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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE 

No. 22 

Editors : 

HERBERT FISHER, M A., F.B.A. 
Prof. GILBERT MURRAY, Litt.D., 

LL.D., F.B.A. 
Prof. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A. 
Pbof. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A. 



THE HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE 

VOLUMES NOW READY 

HISTORY OF WAR AND PEACE . G. H. Pebris 

POLAR EXPLORATION Dr.W.S.Bruce,LL.D.,P.R.S.E. 

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION . . . Hilaibk Bblloo, M.A. 

THE STOCK EXCHANGE : A Short 

Study of Investment and Speculation F. W. Hirst 

IRISH NATIONALITY Alice Stopford Green 

THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT ... J. Ramsay MacDonald, M.P. 

PARLIAMENT : Its History, Constitu- 
tion, AND Practice Sm Courtenay Ilbert, K.C.B., 

K.C.S.L 

MODERN GEOGRAPHY Marion I. Newbigin, D. So. 

William Shakespeare .... John masefield. 

THE EVOLUTION OP PLANTS . . D.H.Scott,M.A.,LL.D.,F.R.S. 

the OPENING-UP OF AFRICA . . Sm H. H. Johnston, G.C.M.G. 

K.C.B., D.Sc, F.Z.S. 

MEDIEVAL EUROPE H. W. C. Davis, M.A. 

THE SCIENCE OF WEALTH ... J. A. Hobson, M.A. 

INTRODUCTION TO MATHEMATICS A. N. Whitehead, Sc.D. F.R.S. 

THE ANIMAL WORLD F. W. Gamble, D.Sc, F.R.S. 

EVOLUTION J. Arthur Thomson, M.A., and 

Patrick Geddes, M.A. 

LIBERALISM L. T. Hobhouse, M.A. 

CRIME AND INSANITY Dr. C. A. Mercier, F.R.C.P., 

F.R.C.S. 

THE CIVIL WAR Frederic L. Paxson, Ph.D. 

THE CIVILIZATION OF CHINA . . H. A. Giles, M.A., LL.D. 

HISTORY OF OUR TIME, 1885-1911 . G. P. Gooch, M.A. 

ENGLISH LITERATURE : MODERN . George Mair, M.A. 

PSYCHICAL RESEARCH W. F. Barrett, F.R.S. 

THE DAWN OF HISTORY .... J. L. Myres, M.A., F.S.A. 

ELEMENTS OF ENGLISH LAW . . W. M. Gbldart, M.A., B.C.L. 

ASTRONOMY A. R. Hinks, M.A. 

INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE ... J. Arthur Thomson 

THE PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES Rev. Dr. William Barry 

THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY . D. H. MAcaREGOR, M.A. 

\* Other Yolumes in active preparation. List on request 



THE PAPACY 

AND MODERN TIMES 

A POLITICAL SKETCH, 1303-1870 

BY 

WILLIAM BARRY, D.D. 

SOMETIME SCHOLAR OF THE ENGLISH COLLEGE, ROME 

AUTHOR OF "the PAPAL MONARCHY"; AND 

A CONTRIBUTOR TO THE " CAMBRIDGE 

MODERN history" 



Hinc septem dominos videre montes, 
£t totam licet aestimare Romam. 

Martial. 

See from his height the seven lordly hills. 
And measure hence the total worth of Rome 




NEW YORK 
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

LONDON 
WILLIAMS AND NORGATE 






Copyright, 191 i, 

BY 
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 






THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. 



A3035'.2 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Preface • . o vii 

Prologue, The Vatican and the Roman Father 1 1 

CHAP. 

I From Avignon to Constance 33 

II From Constance to the Sack of Rome . • • 64t 

III From the Sack of Rome to the Beginnings 

of the Thirty Years' War 99 

IV From the Escorial to Versailles 133 

V From Louis XIV to the Revolution .... 162 

VI From the Revolution to Waterloo . • • . 187 

VII From Waterloo to the Fall of Rome ... 211 

Bibliography 253 

Index ••.•......••••••• 26S 



PREFACE 

These pages do not undertake to frame or to 
resolve religious problems ; they are not a treatise in 
Canon Law ; neither will they attempt Church history 
in any proper sense of the word. I have called my 
little book a ^^ political sketch/' and in that light, 
with all due courtesy, it is offered to the Home 
University collection. Its purpose may be stated 
in a sentence. I desire to explain how it is that 
the Twentieth of September, 1870, when I saw the 
Italian army enter Rome, forms a landmark in the 
story of Western Europe and, by consequence, in 
the development of modem society on both sides of 
the Atlantic. For, if the scene is Rome, the horizon 
is America. There are three terms of comparison 
involved — the Papacy, the Absolute State, and the 
American Constitution, which last, derived from 
England, owes its principles to the Great Charter 
and to Edward the Confessor. Putting these high 
abstract forms into the concrete, we may behold on 
our stage, Washington, Napoleon, and Hildebrand* 
Of these, Washington needs no description; he 
shines by his own splendour in the sky of liberty, 
sua se luce signat, Hildebrand, the least known to 
men at this hour, is by no means the least important. 



viii PREFACE 

He stands outside my limits, but in theory and ideal 
he pervades the whole narrative, from Boniface VIII. 
to Pius IX. As for Napoleon, he is Caesar come to 
life again, inheriting from the Roman Empire, from 
Philip the Fair, and Louis XIV., his conception of 
untrammelled power, and from many an Italian 
tyrant his ambition to found a Kingdom of Italy. 
Napoleon first abolished the Temporal Power in 
principle and in fact; he is the true author of the 
Venti Settembre. 

But its causes go very far back; it was already 
preordained as a fatal term to this unique dominion 
from the day of Anagni, September 7, 1303, when 
Colonna, the Roman Prince, and Nogaret, the French 
lawyer, outraged Pope Boniface on his throne — 
^^that throne," says Lecky, ^^ which was once the 
center and the archetype of the political system of 
Europe, the successor of Imperial Rome." Now the 
Pope sits like a prisoner in his Vatican over against 
the Italian king, who, from within the usurped 
chambers of the Quirinal, governs on the lines of 
Napoleon's famous Code (though with some figure 
of a Parliament), his modern revolutionary State. 
The situation has lasted forty years. It is unique, 
dramatic, pregnant of consequences. To sum up, 
the Papacy was for hundreds of years suzerain over 
kings, and the Holy Roman Empire was its armed 
defender. It is now the head of a world-wide 
voluntary association which wields no sword but its 
faith, and which owes nothing to secular govern- 
ments. How so remarkable a transformation came 



PREFACE ix 

to pass, and what it means politically, is the subject 
I have taken in hand. It is a chapter in the history 
of spiritual freedom. So long as the Vatican endures, 
Caesarism will not have won the day. 

I speak, of course, always under correction, with 
a deep sense of my own inadequacy in grappling 
with matters so difficult and so controverted ; nor 
am I able, as I should like, to express my gratitude 
to the writers, past and present, by whose hght I 
travel. Let me beg the reader's indulgent sympathy. 

William Barry. 

LEA]VaNGTON', 

In Festo S. Petri ad Vincula, 
August 1, 1911. 



THE PAPACY 
AND MODERN TIMES 

PROLOGUE 

THE VATICAN AND THE ROMAN FATHER 

(aeneid, IX., 449) 

Two thousand years ago, in round numbers, 
the Italian city called Rome had brought 
under its sway all those peoples, civilized or 
barbarian, who dwelt between the Euphrates 
and the Atlantic, south of Rhine and Danube, 
and north of the African deserts. This great 
confederation was known as the Roman 
Empire. Its ruler held at once the supreme 
civil power and the control of religion. He 
bore as a title in the secular State the name 
of Caesar; as chief priest that of Pontifex 
Maximus. So had events determined after 
the battle of Actium (31 B.C.), when the old 
Republic was changed into an absolute 
monarchy (though disguised by keeping the 
popular designations), the head of which was 
Augustus, grand-nephew of that Julius whom 
Shakespeare extols as *'the foremost man of 

11 



12 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

all this world/' Imperial Rome, likewise, 
though in a somewhat hard, military fashion, 
took to itself the culture of Hellas, which it 
has taught Europeans to miscall Greece. 
It had long struggled against foreign religious 
rites, and often put them down by law; 
especially the frenzied cults of Bacchus and 
Isis. But when the native Italian blood had 
been recklessly spilt in civil wars, and Rome 
grew Orientalized by its multitudes of slaves 
and parasites from Eastern lands, such 
secret, fantastic, and professedly wonder- 
working forms of worship gained an immense 
influence. They brought to the capital of 
civilization an idea as of something universal, 
which corresponded with its own dignity and 
its office towards mankind. There was 
conceivable a deep interpenetration of the 
outward Roman framework of society by a 
spiritual force. But these old heathen 
superstitions were not destined to achieve 
so noble an enterprise. For Israel had 
already learnt from its prophets the true 
Religion of Humanity. Judaism was enlarged 
in thought and outlook until it became the 
Catholic Church. The first Rome had been 
established on the Palatine Hill. A second 
now sprang into being on the Vatican. 



PROLOGUE— THE VATICAN IS 

Jew conquered Roman as Roman had con- 
quered East and West. We may fix the date 
and symbolize the consequences of this 
greater triumph in a description left us by 
Tacitus, the most philosophical among Latin 
historians, of Nero's dealings with a certain 
folk, "hated for their general wickedness, 
whom the vulgar called Christians" (Annals, 
XV., 44). 

Outside the city walls, and across the 
Tiber to the north-west, rises, not quite 
one hundred feet above the Mediterranean 
level, Mons Vaticanus, the HUIl of Prophecy. 
It had its name perhaps from an Etruscan 
oracle. Its gardens belonged to Agrippina, 
Nero's mother, and thus came to him; on 
their site Caligula and Claudius had built a 
circus for chariot-racing which Nero haunted. 
The goal was an obelisk from Heliopolis, 
standing nearly where the high altar of St. 
Peter's now stands. And the obelisk adorns 
the centre of the great square, with this 
writing upon it, "Christ conquers, Christ 
reigns, Christ commands; Christ defend 
His people from all harm." The words sum 
up a revolution and a history. They bring 
back that First of August, 64 (the year of 
Rome, 817), when the Vatican gardens 



14 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

blazed with living victims, whose alleged 
crime it was that they had set the city on 
fire. They are associated with the martyrdom 
of St. Peter and St. Paul, whom the Roman 
Church reveres as its founders. They imply, 
as St. John does in the Apocalypse, that the 
persecuting Emperor was Antichrist. In their 
triumphant tone we listen to the battle-cry 
of centuries, during which Catholicism fought 
its way to victory. The Palatine is a heap 
of ruins; St. Peter's Confession draws pil- 
grims from the ends of the earth. And so 
the Vatican dominates those "" seven lordly 
hills'' which Martial celebrates on our title- 
page. 

All things that seemed fatal to this new 
birth of time favoured it. "The blood 
of martyrs," said TertuUian, "became the 
seed of the Church." Vespasian and Titus 
made Rome the centre of Christian hopes 
when they destroyed Jerusalem. When, after 
Severus, the West fell into anarchy; when 
riches, peace, and learning were more and 
more the heritage of countries lying east 
of the Adriatic, St. Peter's successor was 
gathering strength. St. Cyprian of Carthage 
venerated the Apostolic Chair; we hear 
already the term Pontifex Maximus applied 



PROLOGUE— THE VATICAN 15 

to the Pope. Constantine erected a temple 
on the spot where St. Peter was crucified. 
He paved the way for a division of the Empire 
by founding his new capital on the Bosporus 
over against Asia; thus abandoning Rome, 
Italy, Spain, Gaul, Germany, to this un- 
daunted power. The Popes were statesmen; 
they refused to be mere metaphysicians; and 
their calm adherence to tradition gave them 
the casting-vote when Antioch quarrelled 
with Alexandria, when Constantinople was 
torn by religious factions, when orthodox 
and heterodox alike appealed to Julius, 
Celestine, Leo — names of majesty, not soiled 
by disputes or degraded in the strife of 
councils. The calamities which overtook this 
degenerate civilization left the Vatican sacred 
and secure. Leo, deservedly known as the 
Great (440-461), stopped the march of 
Attila. The Vandals ruined Carthage; but, in 
deference to the same eloquent PontiflF, they 
spared the Roman shrines. Islam afforded 
to the Popes during nearly eleven hundred 
years a definite and urgent plea for exercis- 
ing in defence of Christendom almost a dic- 
tator's office. Mohammedan fury laid waste 
Egypt, Africa, Syria; it humbled the proud 
Byzantine Emperor; it subdued Spain, and 



16 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

invaded France. As the eighth Christian 
century ended it was manifest that none but 
the Roman Father could bestow on Europe, 
from lUyria to Ireland, a humane religion or 
the elements of civilized life. 

Two names cast a gleam upon the darkness 
which followed the inroads of Barbarians 
and Islamites — St. Benedict, who appears 
as a lawgiver, shaping monastic rules into 
principles by which order was brought out 
of chaos; and St. Gregory, who laid in desolate 
Rome the great bases of a future Christian 
commonwealth. To them we owe it that 
the sovereign city was "" victorious in her 
mourning weeds.'' Benedict, in the cloister, 
began to create an order of peace and indus- 
try, making labour a divine service. Gregory 
fed the multitude, resisted the yet half -savage 
Lombards, sent missionaries to Britain, and 
saw the Barbarians turning from Arianism 
to the Catholic faith. He claimed a suzer- 
ainty over the Spanish Kings; he became 
a friend of that nation born to illustrious 
fortunes, the Franks. Another Gregory, in 
the quarrel with Leo, breaker of sacred 
images, did all he could to preserve Italy 
for its Byzantine masters while resisting 
their fanaticism (726-731). He failed; the 



PROLOGUE— THE VATICAN 17 

Romans acclaimed him deliverer, and gave 
to St. Peter the Eternal City. Thus began 
what is now known as the Temporal Power 
of the Popes. "Their noblest title/' says 
Gibbon as he relates this memorable trans- 
action, "is the free choice of a people whom 
they had redeemed from slavery." 

But observe their condition henceforth. 
Supreme guardians of religion over the whole 
West, they are viewed at Constantinople 
as rebels. They must keep a hand on the 
"Roman People,'' proud and turbulent, 
hating strangers, though supported by 
contributions from foreign pilgrims ad limina 
— at the Apostle's threshold — and ready to 
break out on every pretext. Between the 
Later an "clergy" and the "army" of the 
Palatine friction is unceasing. To the north, 
pressing continually down from their Alps, 
we see a fierce ambitious tribe of Lombards, 
who covet the wealth and splendour of the 
golden city. South of the Papal territories 
and behind them lies the Sicilian world, 
menaced by Greeks and Saracens, open later 
on to a famous Norman Conquest. Here 
is the key of the situation. Whoever holds 
at one time Milan or Pavia together with 
Naples, can take the Vatican as in a net. 



18 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

This combination no Pope would ever will- 
ingly allow. To be the subject of a Western 
prince would dishonour the Supreme Pontiff; 
but if he is to enjoy freedom, then a balance 
of power in Italy and a distant protector, 
whom he can call in and send home again, 
will alone secure it. When the Lombards 
threaten, he appeals to the Prankish dynasty 
— to Pepin, whom Zachary, in 752, crowned 
King by the hands of St. Boniface. Pepin 
crosses the Alps, defeats Astolf, gives his 
spoils to the Holy See. That is Pepin's 
donation (756). Fresh troubles bring his 
son, Charles the Great, to Rome in 774. 
Pope Hadrian declares him Patrician, and 
obtains for the Roman Duchy those limits 
which it preserved almost down to 1870. 
To the south all that Byzantium lost the 
Papacy won. Hadrian assumed regal state. 
But it was Leo III., who by a bold and happy 
stroke created the Holy Roman Empire on 
Christmas Day, 800. Meekly prostrate be- 
fore him in St. Peter's, Charles received the 
crown, and was hailed Augustus by a re- 
joicing people. 

This magnificent sight was often to be 
renewed during six hundred and fifty years, 
but seldom without bloodshed. To our 



PROLOGUE— THE VATICAN 19 

ancestors, the wild men who occupied Europe 
by right of their swords, the Pax Romana 
was a term void of understanding. FeudaHsm 
supposed and perpetuated the state of war; 
peace could be only a "Truce of God," 
a Sabbath interval. When Henry HI., as 
Emperor, extended it to half the year, his 
nobles loudly protested. Not until Amalfi, 
Venice, Genoa began to flourish, was an 
industrial pacific order of things conceivable. 
We must imagine the "war of all against 
all" as never wholly ceasing, until its ferocity 
was lifted to enthusiasm by crusading ardour, 
and expeditions to Palestine allowed the 
peasant, the farmer, the merchant of the West 
a chance to develop their resources in their 
own way. Mediaeval Europe was a camp 
with a church in the background. 

Rome, in particular, had neither industry 
nor commerce. Its brigand-chiefs, Frangi- 
pani, Orsini, Colonna, entrenched themselves 
in the mighty ruins, built hundreds of towers 
from their brick or marble, and sallied forth 
morning after morning bent on revenge or 
robbery. The Church became, in spite of 
laws and saints, a feudal preserve. Its 
wealth went on growing, until it held from 
one- third to one-half of all the land in Europe. 



20 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

Its bishops were princes, its abbots great 
lords. And the protection of sanctuary, the 
power of mortmain, were defended by "ex- 
communication'' which cut oflF assailants 
from holy things, or by "interdict," which 
deprived a whole country of religious 
observances. These were strong but often 
necessary measures. Yet the kings and 
nobles who had enriched the Church took 
away with one hand what they gave with 
the other. They made of their children, 
legitimate or illegitimate, "spiritual persons" 
enjoying the privileges of clerics; thrust 
them into well-endowed sees; and created 
the enormous scandal of boy-bishops and 
even boy-Popes. A mailclad hierarchy turned 
the crozier into a sword. Meanwhile, Charle- 
magne's descendants broke up and lost 
his wide Empire. The Papacy fell into 
unspeakable degradation. It was exploited 
during eighty-two years by the House of 
Theophylact (882-964). There comes a ray 
of troubled sunshine when the German 
Otho I. appears as a "tenth-century Charle- 
magne." At the sad millennium after Christ 
we admire and pity the swiftly-passing, 
gracious figures of Otho III. and Silvester II. 
Otho was made to be the soldier of the Cross, 



PROLOGUE— THE VATICAN 21 

and Silvester was the first French Pope, a 
man of letters who meets Arabian science on 
its own ground, while he projects though he 
cannot execute the first Crusade. 

Christendom, in spite of the Iron Age, 
was forming little by little. The Vatican 
blessed or sent forth missionaries to the 
heathen, Patrick, Augustine, Columban, 
Boniface, Cyril, Adalbert. Cloisters grew 
into cities. Teutonic and other knights 
compelled the pagan nations to come in. 
Stephen of Hungary converted his people, 
took his crown from the hands of St. Peter, 
and was Papal Legate in his own dominions. 
St. Olaf rudely constrained the Norsemen to 
receive baptism, and as much as could be 
given them of southern culture. Their sea- 
faring cousins settled in France as Normans; 
sailed round to Sicily; captured Pope Leo IX. 
at Civitella in 1053; obtained his pardon 
with the investiture of Naples; and under 
a certain William well known to us conquered 
at Hastings in 1066. The lineaments of 
modern Europe begin to appear. At this 
turning-point the Papal succession was re- 
formed. Benedictine monks, trained under 
the infiuence of French Cluny, ascended St. 
Peter's Chair. Hildebrand, a Catholic and 



22 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

monastic Julius Caesar, governed the Church 
as archdeacon or pope for thirty-seven 
years (1048-1085). He may be said to 
have given to mediaeval Europe its definite 
form. 

The Church and the Empire — an ecclesi- 
astical order with its own courts, jurisdiction, 
properties, immunities, facing a secular order 
with its tenures, claims, ambitions; and above 
each its crowned representative supreme 
— such is the shape into which Christian 
society falls during the Middle Ages. Every 
king except the King of France had, at one 
season or another, become liegeman to the 
Pope, or, at any rate, wielded his sceptre 
by approval at Rome. Even William the 
Conqueror accepted from Alexander II. a 
consecrated banner on his expedition; though 
England did not become a fief of the Holy 
See until Henry IL, and most explicitly 
King John, put it into sanctuary as a defence 
against their subjects. But now, under 
Hildebrand, when he was made Gregory VII., 
and when Henry IV. was the German Caesar, 
an opposition broke out which had long been 
threatening, and which these two men, so 
strangely unlike, brought to a crisis. Investi- 
ture, the mystic ceremony by which prelates 



PROLOGUE— THE VATICAN 23 

took possession of their dignities and emolu- 
ments, was claimed as a right on both sides. 
This confusion of powers seemed likely to 
reduce the Papacy itself to an imperial 
*'fief/' or the Empire to a Papal ''benefice." 
Rome, in its distress, could always refuse 
acknowledgment by any and every cleric of 
secular authority, thus setting up a kingdom 
apart, though scattered, throughout the West. 
Caesar learned to reply with anti-popes and 
intruded prelates; he could lay violent hands 
upon Church property, exile its lawful holders, 
and scorn interdicts. These things all came 
to pass. But Henry IV. was no match for 
Gregory VII., and the Emperor's three days' 
penance in the snow at Canossa (January, 
1076) alone saved him from deposition by the 
Roman Pontiff. Canossa meant victory for 
the cleric over the layman, and the layman 
never forgot it. 

Hildebrand's ''imperial mind,'' as Newman 
called it, had seen and brought out the com- 
plete idea of the Papacy. By insisting on a 
celibate priesthood, by strict alliance with 
monasticism, by use of the deposing power, 
by Roman Councils, and by taking up once 
more the design of a crusade against Islam, 
he intended to establish beyond peril of 



24 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

defeat a theocracy according to the New 
Testament. This was to be the reign of the 
Saints. It did not find its charter, Gregory 
would have said, in Constantine's alleged 
donation or in the "'False Decretals" pre- 
sented to Pope Nicholas I. On the contrary, 
its rights were all summed up in St. Leo's 
pregnant language as "'Petri privilegium," 
St. Peter's Gospel-right. The Holy See 
judged all and was judged of none. The 
sword of the flesh must obey the sword of 
the spirit. Although Csesar might claim the 
things which were Csesar's, for him to meddle 
with the things that were God's was sacrilege. 
The Pope taught the creed, gave or withheld 
crowns on appeal, acted as commander-in- 
chief of Christendom, and raised a steadily- 
increasing revenue on behalf of the Holy 
War. Gregory's French successor, Urban II., 
opened at Clermont in 1095 the era of 
expeditions to Palestine, which preserved 
Europe from becoming a Mohammedan prov- 
ince, and brought back dangerous but 
fruitful trophies of civilization from Syria. 
The Crusades, properly so termed, went on 
with intermission between 1099 and 1272. 
But as late as Clement XI. (1700-1721) the 
Roman Pontiffs were still lifting up the cross 



PROLOGUE— THE VATICAN 25 

against the crescent. It is their distinction 
and their glory. 

Investitures had been settled by a fair com- 
promise between Calixtus II. and Henry V. 
at the second Council of Later an (1123), 
which ratified the Concordat of Worms and 
recognized the double aspect incident to 
temporal possessions in the hands of the 
clergy. But if we assign the modern move- 
ment in politics, philosophy, and letters to the 
twelfth century, we must look to Paris and 
France for its origin. France was the brain, 
the eye, the armed right hand of mediaeval 
Europe. Paris now became to Catholic 
studies that which Athens had been to the 
Greeks, — a living university where ideas and 
systems fought their battle. The school 
philosophy — a blend of Aristotle and Plato 
in somewhat disguised Latin forms with 
Church tradition — started on its brilliant 
course from the abbey of Bee in Normandy. 
Among its first lights were Lanfranc and St. 
Anselm, who both ruled England as Arch- 
bishops of Canterbury. Urban 11. , Calixtus 
II., were French Popes. St. Bernard, king of 
the age, soul of the Second Crusade, dictator 
to the Vatican itself, where his disciple 
Eugenius III. reigned, was a Burgundian. 



26 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

Abelard (1079-1142), the ancestor of Des- 
cartes and Chateaubriand, came from Brit- 
tany to Paris, and there opened the movement 
of Free Thought by his amazing audacity and 
eloquence. He trained Arnold of Brescia, 
democratic agitator, champion of the "volun- 
tary system," who was opposed to temporal 
dominion whether of Pope or bishop, and 
who died a martyr under the Englishman, 
Hadrian IV., on account of his opinions. 
Hadrian broke the Roman Republic which 
Giordano the Patrician, with Arnold to 
counsel him, had set up. But the sturdy 
Saxon found a terrible opponent in Frederick 
Barbarossa, the Hohenstauffen Emperor; 
and the hundred years' war between Ghibel- 
line and Guelf may be dated from 1155. 

Frederick the Redbeard has been compared 
to Hannibal in Italy. His twenty-two years' 
struggle with Hadrian IV. and Alexander HI., 
with Lombard cities and their League of 
Freedom, was an effort to restore in the West 
such an absolute imperial authority as the 
Emperor of Byzantium exercised. A pure 
German, he claimed to be the old-time Caesar. 
His appeal rang out to Roman law, and was 
enforced by the massacre of Roman citizens, 
by the destruction of Milan in 1162, and by 



PROLOGUE— THE VATICAN 27 

the usual device of an Anti-pope. Ghibellines 
discovered their political theory in the Code 
and Institutes of Justinian, to which Irnerius 
at Bologna (about 1100) had drawn his 
scholars' attention. This proved to be an 
event of far-reaching importance. Hitherto, 
Ihe Vatican had ruled by means of Canon 
Law, to which only barbarian or local systems 
of legislation could be opposed. But now the 
Emperor (at Roncaglia, 1158) proclaimed his 
boundless rights over clergy and laity in 
virtue of an independent Code, which the 
Popes had not created and were unable to 
modify. The secular State, first appearing in 
the shape of this imperial supremacy, was 
born. Frederick would not hear of a self- 
governing Italy or a Pope who declined to 
be his subject. Alexander III. called upon 
Lombards, Romans, Venetians, to defend 
their freedom; and in 1176, thanks to the vic- 
tory of Legnano, Alexander won. He took the 
public homage of Barbarossa, himself throned 
at St. Mark's, Venice, while the Emperor bent 
his knee on July 24, 1177. But there was 
now a duel to the death between the Hohen- 
stauffen and the Papacy. Guelf and Ghibel- 
line tore Italian civilization to pieces. By 
the marriage of Redbeard's son Henry V. to 



28 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

Constance, Sicily was added to the Empire; 
their child was the accomplished, fascinating, 
unhappy Frederick II., in whose tomb at 
Palermo the dynasty lies buried (1198-1250). 
We have come to Innocentlll. (1198-1216), 
who put the Western Church in possession 
of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade; 
who set up Emperors in Germany and pulled 
them down again; w^ho smote the Albigenses 
in a religious war until they were consumed; 
who brought Ejng John to his knees in the 
Temple Church at London, and made Eng- 
land a fief of the Holy See; who gave to Italy 
peace and good laws; who had for his cham- 
pions the Friars, sent forth over Christendom 
by Francis and Dominic; and who, lastly, by 
recognizing Frederick II. as lawful Csesar, be- 
queathed to his own successors an Iliad of 
woes. The thirteenth century saw Cathol- 
icism triumph in its mighty volumes of 
Canon Law — the Decretals. It beheld the 
glory of scholastic wisdom in St. Thomas 
Aquinas. It served as a stage to the tragedy 
of the Hohenstauffen, — ^Frederick U. deposed 
at the Council of Lyons in 1245 by Inno- 
cent IV.; Conradin executed on the scaffold 
at Naples in 1268. Its culminating point was 
perhaps reached in 1274, when Gregory X. 



PROLOGUE— THE VATICAN 29 

sat in another Council of Lyons amid five 
hundred bishops, seventy abbots, and a 
thousand of the clergy. The Churches of 
East and West uttered there a common 
creed and acknowledged one Pope, who 
confirmed Rudolph of Habsburg as German 
Emperor, recognized the claims of Michael 
Paleologus to the throne of Constantinople, 
and laid down wise rules for Papal elections 
in the future. But with Frederick II. had 
in truth expired the Holy Roman Empire. 
The long succession of Teutons henceforth 
proceeds on a line of its own, not that traced 
by Charlemagne or seen in vision by Dante. 
In France St. Louis leaves the world to Philip 
the Fair and his lawyers. The last Crusade 
is over in 1272. When Acre falls in 1291 
the Holy Land ceases to inspire European 
politics. When Boniface VIII. was elected 
Pope at Naples, in December, 1294, and the 
great Jubilee followed in 1300, a catastrophe 
was hanging over the Papacy with which 
we may affirm that the Middle Ages came to 
an end. 

This change from sacerdotal to secular 
supremacy, or from the hieratic to the modern 
State, had been long preparing. Norman 
Kings like William of England and Henry 



30 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

IL; Sicilian, of the same blood, not less 
determined and astute; Aragonese and An- 
gevin, quarrelling for the succession of 
Naples; all these were driven by a similar 
impulse, which they obeyed without seeking 
to explain it. The Franconian Emperors 
did not realize that its philosophy might be 
found in legislation stamped with the names 
of Justinian, Theodosius, and the Antonines. 
But Barbarossa knew, and Frederick II. 
acted upon this memorable discovery. They 
underwent defeat. The idea of an Imperial 
law, a crown not granted by the Vatican, a 
subjection to the king from which no exemp- 
tion might be pleaded, was at length trans- 
lated into French terms and carried into exe- 
cution by French logic. Disputes of a transient 
importance had arisen between Boniface VIII. 
and Philip the Fair. Boniface upheld ancient 
clerical immunities, the doctrine of the two 
swords, the deposing power, in language bor- 
rowed from Innocent III., from Gregory VII. 
Philip answered with scorn and defiance. 
The Pope fixed a day for his deposition, 
September 8, 1303. On the day preceding, 
Nogaret, Philip's minister of vengeance, rode 
into Anagni with three hundred horse, and 
the mediaeval, the sacred order of things 



PROLOGUE— THE VATICAN 31 

which had lasted under conflict during five 
centuries, expired in that crime which Dante 
has Hkened to the crucifixion itself: 

**Lo, the flower de luce 
Enters Alagna; in His Vicar Christ 
Himself a captive, and His mockery 
Acted again." 

The story which we now attempt begins 
when Boniface is dead, the Vatican deserted. 
King Philip master of the Sacred College, 
and Avignon looms on the horizon. It 
fills five hundred and seventy years, more 
than as much as the sad and glorious period 
from Charlemagne to this "new Pilate," in 
whose keeping the successor of St. Peter lay 
a prisoner. Its commencements are tragical; 
but it shows the power of the Spirit traversing 
many vicissitudes; by captivity and schism, 
by Renaissance and Reformation, by heresies 
and enlightenment and a still greater French 
Revolution arriving at an independence of 
earthly forces, most honourable to the 
something in man which despises outward 
constraint. These highest things always 
admit of an interpretation according to the 
mind that views them. To measure their 
greatness demands sympathy; and sympathy 
is kindled only by a vivid fancy, a heart 



32 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

susceptible to human touches, to pity and 
love. The Vatican is a name more august 
than the Parthenon, more abounding in 
situations that excite all human emotions 
than the stage of Dionysus at Athens, full 
of millennial hopes and the pathos of man's 
history, not yet illuminated by any visible 
and reconciling last scene. To the Catholic 
who reads, I would commend the exercise of 
his faith, having trust in the event, ro) reXet 
iTiGTiv ^epcov. To the general student and 
curious dilettante in man's ways, let me say, 
"These too had their sorrows, their heavy 
task, ere they passed into the unknown. 
Remember that they were like unto thee as 
thou art like unto them. We will look over 
these chronicles together, and learn from 
them how divine, how helpless, how much 
to be pitied and wondered at a thing is 
human nature.'* 



CHAPTER I 

FROM AVIGNON TO CONSTANCE (1305-1417 
DANTE, PURG. XXXIl) 

When, on December 29, 1170, Thomas 
Archbishop of Canterbury was murdered in 
his cathedral, the King whose satellites had 
wrought this great outrage lost all he had 
been contending for. Retribution followed 
on the heels of sacrilege; and Henry II. 
bared his back to scourging at the martyr's 
tomb. Clerical immunities were saved in 
England. The royal supremacy was ad- 
journed for three hundred and sixty years. 
Very different were the consequences of that 
morning at Anagni. Philip not only kept 
his threatened crown; he led the Papacy 
captive. Benedict XI., a mild Dominican, 
who for one moment occupied St. Peter's 
Chair, released the French King and his 
people from censure. He explained the 
Papal document "Clericis laicos" so that 
it should not imply feudal claims over the 
realm of St. Louis. He died (by poison, said 
the vulgar talk); a vacancy of nine months 

33 



34 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

ensued; and Philip in secret made an unholy 
compact with Bertrand, Archbishop of Bor- 
deaux, by which the tiara was sold and 
bought. The King undertook to have his 
Gascon subject chosen; the Gascon promised 
to condemn Boniface; to grant full pardon 
for the past; to give the Colonna their lands 
again; and, as is thought, to let Philip 
plunder and destroy the Knights Templars. 
Bertrand was elected, crowned at Lyons, 
and speedily environed with a college of 
French Cardinals. He never set foot in 
Rome. He revoked the Bull ''Clericis" 
and gave a non-contentious meaning to the 
*'Unam Sanctam'' which had haughtily 
asserted the doctrine of the two swords, one 
to be wielded, the other to be guided by 
Christ's Vicar on earth. In 1309 Clement V. 
took up his abode at Avignon, a city belonging 
to Philip's kinsman, Charles II. of Naples. 
The seventy years of Babylonish captivity 
had begun. Seven French Popes ruled in suc- 
cession from the wind-swept heights and in the 
sunburnt luxurious palace — a fortress, church, 
prison, as it proved — of this false Rome. 

Hitherto, France had offered a constant 
refuge to the Pontiffs in their troubles. As 
far back as 754 Stephen III. had taken shelter 



AVIGNON TO CONSTANCE 35 

with Pepin at Pontliion from the Lombard 
Astolf. John VIII., after 874, fled to Louis 
the Stammerer. Leo IX. at Rheims, in 1050, 
deposed simoniacal French prelates, and 
demonstrated the Primacy by Canon Law. 
Hildebrand at Tours, as Papal commissioner, 
put down the free-thinking Berengar; under 
Victor 11. he compelled a multitude of guilty 
bishops and dignitaries to surrender their 
ill-gotten trusts. Urban II., French by 
extraction, announced the First Crusade at 
Clermont in 1095, while Philip I., King of 
France, lay under the Church's ban. Calix- 
tus IL, formerly Guido of Vienne, renewed the 
Truce of God at Rheims in 1119, while 
Henry I. of England and Louis VI. pleaded 
before his tribunal against each other. 
Eugenius EEL took refuge at Dijon in 1147. 
For three years Alexander III., escaping 
from Barbarossa, became Louis VII. 's guest 
at Courcy-sur-Loire. In the French city of 
Lyons (as yet Imperial and Free) two General 
Coimcils were held — that of 1245 by Innocent 
IV., and that of 1274 by Gregory X. GalHc 
influences were now prevailing in the Sacred 
College. In 1261 Pantaleon of Troyes was 
made Pope Urban IV. He offered the crown 
of Naples to St. Louis, who would not accept 



36 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

it. Then this disposer of kingdoms bestowed 
it on Charles of Anjou, Count of Provence. 
Clement IV., a southern Frank, succeeded to 
Urban in 1265; during his stormy reign 
Manfred was defeated and slain at Benevento, 
Conradin perished; Charles of Anjou then 
dictated the Papal elections. Martin IV., a 
Frenchman of Tours, came on in 1281. Next 
year the Sicilians massacred their French 
masters and gave themselves to Aragon 
(the Sicilian Vespers, Easter Tuesday, 1282). 
It was from the Counts of Provence, to whom 
the Holy See had presented Naples on a 
feudal tenure, that Clement V. received hospi- 
tality at Avignon in April, 1309. 

Philip the Fair had thus accomplished a de- 
sign which, five centuries later, tempted Napo- 
leon to imitate it; but the mighty Emperor 
failed where the King succeeded. In truth, 
its long struggle with Teutonic Caesars and 
the Ghibellines of many Italian cities had 
exhausted the strength as well as daunted 
the courage, even of unwearied Rome. For 
a long and dreary interval, Vatican and 
Capitol lay desolate. Many Pontiffs had 
been driven into exile; but an absentee 
Pope, deliberately resident beyond the bounds 
of Italy, struck men as something portentous; 



AVIGNON TO CONSTANCE 37 

and patriots now with Dante, Petrarch, 
Rienzi lamented or rebelled against the dis- 
crowning of their native land, to heighten 
Gallic insolence. Dante, born three centuries 
before Shakespeare (1265-1564) burns into 
his glowing enamel the figures which he 
loved and hated, stamping with infamy 
Boniface, Clement, John XXH., Philip and 
his kinsfolk, one among whom, Charles of 
Valois, gave occasion that the poet should 
suffer lifelong banishment from Florence. An 
ardent Ghibelline henceforth, the exile's hopes 
were blasted by the untimely death in 1313 of 
Henry of Luxemburg. Dying himself broken- 
hearted at Ravenna, seven years afterwards, 
Alighieri left his "mystic unfathomable song" 
to body forth in its gloom and splendours, 
by its tears of fire and mingling of angelic 
harmonies with outbursts of violent passion 
against those who had done him wrong, the 
very "form and pressure" of his age. 

But now, says Lord Acton, "the Popes 
were forced to rely on the protection of 
France; their supremacy over the states 
was at an end; and the resistance of the 
nations commenced." Germany led the way. 
Though Clement V. was the creature and 
the tool of King Philip, sacrificing to his 



38 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

greed the Templars (1310), he found some 
compensation in having behind him the 
strength of France. He was free from the 
tumults which in Rome had so often com- 
pelled the Popes to bow under a popular 
yoke. In 1313 Clement interpreted the oath 
taken by an elected "King of the Romans'* 
to the Holy See as an act of feudal homage. 
He appointed Robert of Naples as Imperial 
Vicar in Italy. When he died and John XXII. 
succeeded, the Germans who stood by Louis 
of Bavaria began their long quarrel with 
Avignon, which may be described as a 
rehearsal between 1322 and 1347 of the 
Reformation on a minor scale. 
I It was not the vacillating Bavarian that 
signij&ed, but under his flag were collected 
many forces until then separate. John XXII. 
(of Cahors), a severe Church lawyer, who 
brought in the later system of Papal finance, 
could not suffer Louis to assume the title 
of Rex Romanorum — which carried with it 
the Imperial succession — ^unless he sought its 
confirmation from the Pope. But to German 
feeling the Pope and France were now iden- 
tical. Weak as the Empire might be, its 
princes would not yield. The crown lawyers 
pleaded against Canon Law. They were 



AVIGNON TO CONSTANCE 39 

supported by Marsilius of Padua, then high 
in the Paris University., and more strangely 
still, by the Franciscan General, Michael of 
Cesena, and by the leading philosopher of the 
day, William of Ockham (called Occam by 
foreign writers), also a Minorite Friar. These 
men drew, from different points of the com- 
pass, towards a political theory with which 
the claims of any and every Pope would be in- 
compatible. Fierce contentions had broken 
the Order of Assisi into Spirituals, who held a 
mystic and extreme view of monastic poverty, 
and Moderates, who conformed in principle 
to the received ideas. To the Spirituals, 
overcome in previous contests, the Papacy 
now seemed a carnal Church; they called 
the Pope Antichrist; they longed for the 
new dispensation of the Holy Ghost, and 
preached the "Eternal Gospel'' announced 
by the Calabrian prophet, Joachim of Flora 
(1145-1202). They revered the memory of 
Celestine V. who, in Dante's contemptuous 
language, "by cowardice made the great 
refusal." Now these "Little Brethren" 
(Fraticelli) brought their wild doctrines and 
unconquerable fanaticism to aid in setting up 
an Emperor whose will should be law, while 
St. Peter's successor lived as a mendicant 



40 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

friar. John XXII. was the last man to accept 
such a position. "'Spiritual" heretics were 
condemned and executed at Narbonne, at 
Toulouse, and elsewhere. Then Michael of 
Cesena revolted. Occam opposed the Bible 
to the Church, rejected the Pope's infallible 
teaching, and disowned the Temporal Power. 
When Luther came to a full knowledge of 
himself, he recognized his master in Occam, 
the "Irrefragable Doctor." 

But in the eyes of modern readers it is 
Marsilius of Padua, the cool-headed student 
and no fanatic, that will claim importance. 
His "Defender of the Peace" appeared in 
1327. It represented the whole community 
as sovereign lawgiver and the "prince" as 
holding of the people. Clerics, including the 
Pope, have no right to exercise "coercive" 
jurisdiction; they may persuade, they must 
not compel by temporal pains and penalties. 
Like other men, they are subject to the 
common law, not exempt, nor entitled to 
courts of their own. Excommunication does 
not belong to an individual priest; it should 
be the act of the body altogether, i.e. of the 
State. As regards heresy, the civil power 
deals with it only as an infraction of public 
order. The prince ought to appoint and 



AVIGNON TO CONSTANCE 41 

deprive ecclesiastics. In fine, the plenitude of 
Papal power is the corruption of the Church. 

These were startling doctrines. They an- 
ticipate Luther by two centuries. They were 
acted on by Henry VIII. and Elizabeth. 
Erastus, the Swiss, with whose name it is 
usual to associate them, did not write until 
1568, nor Grotius, the Dutch Arminian, who 
is more properly their representative, until 
1604 and 1625. We trace them fully devel- 
oped, with peculiar applications, in Hobbes' 
"Leviathan'' and Rousseau's "Social Con- 
tract." Wherever they prevail, the mediaeval 
idea of a Catholic Church supreme over all 
authorities by direct or indirect jurisdiction 
from on high, finds an enemy in law as well 
as in practice. Thanks, on the whole, to 
this Mai:silian view, the "secular State" 
flourishes in Latin countries. Vigorously 
condemned by Clement VI., and rightly 
assimilated by Gregory XI. in 1377 to the 
system of Wycliffe, it reversed the position 
held since Gregory VII. at common law in 
Western Christendom, putting instead of the 
Papal Monarch an absolute prince of this 
world, from whom there was no appeal. 

Louis of Bavaria halted many leagues 
this side of Marsilius. True, he went down 



42 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

into Italy, was chosen Emperor by the pop- 
ulace in Rome (1328), set up as anti-pope a 
Minorite friar calling himself Nicholas V., 
and, with intervals of submission, continued 
Emperor till 1347. But his end was defeat. 
When he died, and an orthodox Catholic, 
Charles of Bohemia, humbly accepted the 
Pope's bidding, "it might seem to Clement 
VI.,'' says Creighton, *'that Boniface VIII. 
had been avenged, and that the majesty 
and dignity of the Papal power had been 
amply vindicated." 

Avignon, melancholy as the name sounds 
in retrospect, could not but appear as a 
brilliant scene and highly successful Court 
of the West to French pontiffs. Their wealth 
became immense; their luxury has passed 
into a proverb. No longer able to count 
on the revenues of Rome or the gifts of 
pilgrims to St. Peter's shrine, John XXII. 
had perfected a scheme of reservations, 
expectatives, annats, and other sources of 
income which for the time brought him in 
riches beyond calculation. In principle, no 
Catholic would refuse to contribute towards 
the necessary expenditure of a system which 
was international, open to virtue and ability 
through all its degrees. The Pope also, as 



AVIGNON TO CONSTANCE 43 

Father of the Faithful, was the only possible 
guardian of the war-chest accumulated for 
defence against Mohammedan assaults. 
Parliaments granted subsidies, the clergy 
were taxed by Curial enactments, and in 
their assemblies were willing to tax them- 
selves, on this understanding. But very great 
abuses followed. ''The Avignon system of 
finance," says Pastor, a most competent wit- 
ness, "contributed more than has been gen- 
erally supposed, to the undermining of the 
Papal authority,'' and it ''soon aroused pas- 
sionate resistance.'' Among the evils which it 
fostered, none perhaps wrought more deadly 
harm than the intrusion of foreigners, French 
or Italian chiefly, into English and other 
Northern sees and benefices. These men 
were, as a rule, non-resident; their claim 
was felt as a burden; and from the time 
of Henry III. to Richard II. a series of 
protests, passing into legislative acts (Pro- 
visors and Prsemunire, 1351-1353), warned 
thoughtful men that resistance might turn to 
revolt. In Germany "grievances" now be- 
came a standing quarrel, which was never 
laid to rest until the catastrophe of 1520 had 
been precipitated beyond recovery. 

While Avignon fiourished in the sun. 



44 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

Rome fell desolate. Benedict XII. began 
in 1339, high above the banks of the turbid 
Rhone, that vast palace-prison (des Doms), 
which seemed as if destined to be the ''eternal 
abode/' says Gregorovius, of the Papacy. 
Clement VI., from Limoges (1342-1352), was 
learned, gracious, extravagantly profuse, 
addicted even more than other French 
pontiffs to nepotism. He has left a doubtful 
reputation; he had quite abandoned the 
thought of returning to the Apostolic See. 
But the ruins and the walls of Rome were 
eloquent. In 1341 Petrarch had been crowned 
with laurel as first of living poets on the 
Capitol. With his delicate Italian verse and 
flowing Latin prose, no longer unpolished and 
barbarous, the Renaissance was attempting 
its first flight. Again, if Clement VI. would 
not take possession of his Lateran basilica, 
there was another that would, and did — 
Rienzi, called ^'Last of the Tribunes,'^ a 
strange figure suddenly visible to all Italy, 
clad in shreds and tatters of imperial purple, 
and for seven months a stage Augustus 
whom nobles and plebeians obeyed (May- 
December, 1347). 

Rienzi was a Roman, a kind of artist, 
an orator and a dreamer, intoxicated with 



AVIGNON TO CONSTANCE 45 

antiquity. He had seen Avignon, charmed 
the Pope, won Petrarch's friendship. At 
Whitsuntide, May 20, 1347, he inaugurated 
the Revolution which was to execute the 
^'Laws of the Good Estate,'' in plain terms, 
of the Roman Republic. He did not deny 
Clement's authority, but passed beyond it. 
Within fifteen days all orders, including the 
Patricians, and at their head Colonna, took 
the popular oath. Rienzi was named dictator 
for life. He ruled justly, received appeals 
from Joan of Naples and Charles of Durazzo, 
was knighted in the Lateran, and sent 
banners to twenty-five Italian republics — 
among them Florence and Siena. He was 
crowned with seven crowns in August; 
was denounced from Avignon, was over- 
thrown, and became a fugitive to the Frati- 
celli, who hid themselves among the glens 
of the Abruzzi, in December. The year 
1348 is marked as a dividing line between 
mediaeval and modern Europe; for it brought 
the Black Death, which swept off one- 
third at least of the population everywhere. 
Clement VI. lived in quarantine behind 
his thick walls, and would admit no man 
to audience. Next year came the Jubilee, 
when Rome was crowded. A great wave 



46 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

of religious excitement passed over the 
nations. Rienzi, now most likely insane, 
went on a prophet's errand to Charles IV. 
at Prague. Charles gave him up to Clem- 
ent, who put him in prison, but did not 
take away his "Livy'' or his Bible — ^books on 
which Rienzi fed his mind. Innocent VI., 
an admirable Pope (1352-1362), made the 
warlike Cardinal Albornoz his legate to 
Rome, and despatched Rienzi with him in 
1353. The former Tribune now became 
Senator; but his mad caprice and "unmiti- 
gated tyranny'' drove the people to rebel. 
On October 8, 1354, he was murdered below 
the lion's cage at the foot of the Capitol. 

Marsilius of Padua had foreseen and 
delineated the absolute State which was to 
come in when Empire and Papacy had lost 
the joint rule of Christendom. Rienzi 
believed in "a confederation, with Rome 
for its head, under a Latin Emperor elected 
by the people." Italy was to be united and 
independent. By this strictly national 
conception Rienzi transcended the Dantean 
ideas which we read in "De Monarchia"; 
for Dante's Holy Roman Empire would have 
been something like the Church, universal, 
not simply Latin, though continuing Csesar. 



AVIGNON TO CONSTANCE 47 

But the Tribune, as Machiavelli did two 
centuries and a half later, bestowed on his 
time an image of Italy free, self-sustained, 
indivisible; and that almost in the hour 
when Charles IV., by his electors' Golden 
Bull of 1355, created the new German Empire. 
Tacitly, Charles renounced interference in 
the Peninsula. The Alps became a political 
boundary. Meanwhile, the Spaniard, Al- 
bornoz, subdued the Papal States, north and 
south (1358). Rome expressed again its 
allegiance to an absentee Bishop. Innocent 
VI. was followed in 1362 by a saintly 
Benedictine monk. Urban V., who broke 
the chain of captivity, despite his cardinals, 
and went back amid the world's applause to 
Rome, in 1367. It was upwards of sixty-two 
years since the Vatican had witnessed St. 
Peter's successor kneeling at St. Peter's 
shrine, and singing mass at the high altar. 

But how times were changed! Philip 
the Fair might have brought down a curse 
on his dynasty; for the line of Capet lost 
all its male heirs. The hundred years' war 
was to end on both sides of the Channel 
in a royal despotism. French power had 
sunk to the lowest ebb; it could no longer 
threaten or uphold the Papacy at Avignon. 



48 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

Edward III. of England was little disposed 
to grant more than lip obedience to one who 
had been a French subject. Petrarch raised 
his voice in stern rebuke of the sinful city 
on the Rhone. At last the Pope said Mass 
in St. Peter's; he crowned Charles IV. in 
1368 where Charlemagne had lain prostrate 
• — it was a splendid but hollow ceremony — 
and two years afterwards returned to his 
more pleasant exile at Avignon, though 
speedily to die. Gregory XI., nephew of 
Clement VI., amiable, erudite, pious, but no 
strong character, who came next, made a 
secret vow that he would restore the Holy See 
to Rome. Unless it were soon done, tyrants 
like the Visconti, "vipers of Milan," or Free 
Companies like that of Hawkwood, the 
Englishman, might be expected to carve 
princedoms for themselves out of the Church's 
ill-governed provinces. Even Florence, Guelf 
and Catholic beyond all other cities, was at 
war with the Pope. St. Brigit of Sweden 
uttered her warning; a still more exquisite 
and singularly winning apparition, St. 
Catherine of Siena, who may perhaps be 
termed the Italian Joan of Arc, was beheld 
in the court at Avignon, as messenger of peace 
from Florence. To her pleadings and the 



"OBEDIENCES" AND "NATIONS" 49 

force of events Gregory yielded. The 
Florentines vehemently protested that his 
coming would destroy Italian freedom. But 
on January 15, 1377, he sailed up the Tiber 
to St. Paul's on the Ostian Way, and so 
entered Rome. To restore peace he found 
was beyond his power. Robert of Geneva, 
the handsome and truculent soldier-cardinal, 
taking into his pay Breton mercenaries as 
well as Hawkwood's desperadoes, smote 
Faenza and Cesena with a horrible slaughter, 
in which thousands perished. Gregory him- 
self expired on March 27, 1378, and his death 
opened an immediate way to the Great 
Schism of the West. 

Section II 

THE "obediences" AND THE "nATIONS" 

(1378-1417) 

Whether Bartholomew Prignani, Archbishop 
of Bari, chosen by all the Cardinals assembled 
in the Vatican while the Roman mob howled 
at their gates, was lawful Pope, is a question 
never formally decided. If he was, the 
succession at Rome from 1378 of Urban VI. 
and his line carries the Papacy forward; 
any other cannot be recognized. This, also. 



50 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

appears to be the almost unanimous opinion 
of historians on the Catholic side. It prevails 
in the Roman Chancery. From a different 
point of view, and regarding the national 
interests or rivalries which gave birth to the 
Reformation, we may consider the Great 
Schism as an attempt, premature but fertile 
in consequences, to break up mediaeval Eu- 
rope ecclesiastically among the French, Ital- 
ians, Spaniards, Germans, and English. The 
*' nations'' that voted at Constance were 
superseding and casting aside the Empire. 
They were also, in fact, debating whether 
each of the European chief divisions should 
not have its own Church. Instead of the 
one Pope, General Councils were to govern; 
and under this parliamentary system, as it 
turned out, laymen would control the clergy, 
while the civil ruler took to himself supreme 
jurisdiction, and the Roman Pontiff sank 
to be a Doge of Venice. These were the 
real points in dispute. On the surface 
it was a matter of Canon Law to be settled 
by jurists. And in its earlier stages the Schism 
renewed that long debate between Rome 
and Avignon, on the part of French Cardinals 
who would not stay to be the sport of a 
ferocious people. "France and Italy," says 



"OBEDIENCES" AND "NATIONS" 51 

an English writer, "were at strife for the 
Popedom.'' That was the sahent, but by no 
means the ultimate, issue. 

Urban VI. had been elected and obeyed 
by all the Cardinals who now at Fondi, in 
September, 1378, voted for Robert of Geneva. 
They made him, so far as lay in their power. 
Pope by the name of Clement VII. After 
sundry adventures, Robert fled from Naples 
to Marseilles, and, entering the deserted 
palace of Avignon, became to France and 
Scotland St. Peter's true successor. The 
lines of demarcation were strictly political, 
not drawn from religious motives at all. 
Milman has described them with an ironic 
touch. "Italy, excepting the Kingdom of 
Joanna of Naples," he says, "adhered to 
her native pontiff; Germany and Bohemia 
to the pontiff who had recognized King 
Wenceslaus as Emperor; England to the 
pontiff hostile to France; Hungary to the 
pontiff who might support her pretensions 
to Naples; Poland and the Northern king- 
doms, with Portugal, espoused the same 
cause." An extraordinary man, Cardinal 
Pedro de Luna, whose fortune it was to 
create the Schism, to continue it, and to 
survive it, had first managed the election of 



52 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

Urban, then denied him in favour of the 
Antipope, and now detached from Rome 
the Spanish kingdoms, Castile, Aragon, and 
Navarre. This Pope-maker was not a dis- 
edifying soldier in a cassock, such as Robert 
of Geneva had been. Neither was he half- 
mad and horribly cruel, as Urban speedily 
showed himself to be. Pedro de Luna pos- 
sessed many of the great qualities which went 
to the making of Hildebrand. Blameless in 
conduct, he was learned and devout, dex- 
terous and winning, but over-subtle and ob- 
stinate as a Spaniard or an Arab in pursuing 
his own fancy. To him, who revered St. 
Catherine of Siena, and who longed to see the 
Church renewed, this forty years' division of 
Christendom is mainly due. He was by far 
the strongest character among the popes, 
kings, prelates, and politicians who attempted 
to deal with it. Pedro de Luna, historically 
speaking, was a Gregory VII. committed 
to a false and fatal position. It required a 
Council of the whole Church to put him down; 
but in his own thought he died a conqueror. 
Not so Urban the Unwise. This rude 
reformer lost Naples by quarrelling with 
Queen Joan, whom he might have kept loyal, 
and with Charles of Durazzo, whom he 



"OBEDIENCES" AND "NATIONS" 53 

crowned. He permitted Charles to put the 
Queen to death. That unhappy Joan was 
a Southern anticipation of Mary Stuart in 
her marriages, her alleged crimes, and her 
fearful end (May 22, 1382). Then he fell out 
with his own nominee, whose Constable 
besieged him in Mohammedan Nocera. The 
Pope suspected his Cardinals of plotting 
against him; he escaped to Genoa, taking 
five of the Sacred College with him as pris- 
oners, who all died mysteriously. Afterwards 
he returned to Rome, and there breathed his 
last, October 15, 1389. St. Catherine, worn 
by austerities and the Church's tribulations, 
had gone before, in April, 1380. Throughout, 
she had acted as Urban's friend and coun- 
sellor; but he was incapable of taking her ad- 
vice. A great Spanish saint, Vincent Ferrer, 
is conspicuous on the other side. The Church, 
sorely perplexed, fell into "obediences.'' 
For Clement VII., so-called, would not resign; 
the Roman cardinals elected Boniface IX., 
and the Schism gained a fresh lease of life 
(1389-1404). 

Boniface IX., like his predecessor and his 
successor, was a Neapolitan. Under him, says 
Pastor, Rome lost the last remains of mu- 
nicipal freedom. His devices to create a 



54 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

revenue were of the old and scandalous kind 
familiar to Avignon. His attempted grants in 
England led to resistance; they provoked the 
final statutes of Provisors and Praemunire 
under Richard II. But it is significantly 
observed by Creighton that "the clergy did 
not regain the rights of which the Pope had 
deprived them; the gain went to the Crown.'' 
We shall see this law of spoliation enforced 
on a great scale whenever princes undertake, 
as they say, to defend the Church; it was 
exemplified in the gradual but never-halting 
process by which monastic possessions and, 
at length, all spiritual lordships, dominions, 
and tenures of whatsoever description were 
secularized. Its final term arrived in 1870 
with the fall of the Temporal Power. Boni- 
face, however, was fortunate enough to re- 
constitute the States of the Church, and to 
hold out against Ladislaus of Naples. In 1394 
Clement VII. passed away. He had done 
nothing memorable beyond "exhausting the 
countries subject to his obedience" by op- 
pressive tolls and taxes. Now the Schism 
should have come to an end. But Pedro de 
Luna had himself chosen Pope as Benedict 
XIII. ; France and Spain acknowledged their 
own man, who, once elected, would not be 
compelled by Crown or university to abdi- 



"OBEDIENCES" AND "NATIONS" 55 

cate. His tactics were as brilliant as they 
were evasive. The French in 1398 withdrew 
their allegiance. Benedict stood a four years' 
siege in his rock-fortress at Avignon, until he 
escaped down the Rhone in March, 1403. 
He won back France. He made a show of 
negotiating with Boniface. He continued his 
diplomacy with Innocent VII., who was 
elected under some degree of compulsion 
from Ladislaus, at that time (1404) advancing 
upon Rome. Innocent's troubled pontificate 
lasted two years. On his death an aged 
Venetian became the Roman Pope, Gregory 
XIL, and pledged himseK to abdicate; but 
like Benedict he would not take the first 
step. What was the Church to do.^ 

So far back as 1381 Henry Langenstein, 
a German of the Paris University, had written 
his "Consilium Pacis," advising an assembly 
of the whole Church to decide between the 
Popes. In that title we hear an echo of 
Marsilius the Paduan. Now the University, 
which held in its ranks the most learned men 
of Christendom, and was itself a standing 
Council where theological questions found 
their answer, was driven reluctantly to 
further this expedient. Nicholas de Cle- 
manges, who had been its Rector, and Pierre 
d'Ailly, an expert scholar, both moderate men. 



56 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

were for a while adherents of Benedict. He 
had made Clemanges his secretary, and in- 
stalled D'Ailly in the rich and extensive bish- 
opric of Cambray. During the fruitless con- 
ferences, embassies, and pleadings which 
came to a head in the Council of Pisa, these 
two excellent writers and diplomatists played 
a creditable part. But they could not per- 
suade Benedict to resign, and when he lost 
their services he fled to Perpignan, June, 
1408. In the previous August, Gregory XII., 
helpless and afraid of the Neapolitan king, 
left Rome, and began his wanderings over 
Italy. Most of the Cardinals on both sides 
now withdrew their obedience, and, by an un- 
precedented exercise of authority, convoked 
a General Council in the Ghibelline city of 
Pisa. Ladislaus did all in his power to pre- 
vent it from meeting. But with France sup- , 
porting it and Florence barring the Neapoli- 
tan's march against it, this anomalous yet 
dignified assembly came together in the 
stately Duomo, March 25, 1409. 

Just upon a century had elapsed since the 
French Council of Vienne had taken place 
under Clement V. In various respects local, 
its recognition as something oecumenical was 
due to the Pope's presidency and subsequent 
approbation. The meeting at Pisa, congre- 



"OBEDIENCES" AND "NATIONS" 57 

gated in spite of protests from both claimants 
(one of whom in the CathoHc view must have 
been legitimate) and approved only by the two 
Popes who derived from it their election, re- 
mains in history the unique thing that it was, 
a revolutionary attempt to heal a situation 
without parallel. Gregorovius calls it, "an 
act of open rebellion against the Pope/' 
Cardinals on either side became accusers and 
judges of the Holy See; other deputies, who 
were not even bishops but merely theologians, 
shared in that solemn sentence whereby 
Gregory XII. and Benedict XIII. were 
simultaneously deposed. Gerson, a devout- 
minded French canonist, who may be con- 
sidered the first Gallican strictly so-called, 
put forward his doctrine, on which Pisa 
founded itself, that the Church could exist 
without a Pope, and that the Pope was 
subject to a General Council. "This was 
the first real step," concludes Gregorovius, 
"towards the deliverance of the world from 
the Papal hierarchy; it was already the 
Reformation.'* 

On June 5, 1409, the above memorable 
decree was voted; twelve days later the 
Cardinals, not without previous licence from 
the Coimcil, elected a Greek of Candia — the 
Franciscan friar and archbishop of Milan, 



58 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

Filargi — to that which they deemed the 
vacant See of Rome. Alexander V. was a 
good friar, but made confusion worse con- 
founded by accepting a debated dignity. 
Three Popes astonished and saddened the 
CathoHc world. In a few months Alexander 
was gone; and Baldassarre Cossa, the Car- 
dinal of Bologna, who had been the soul of the 
Pisan Council, took his place. John XXIII., 
last of that name, is a portent in the succession 
to which he effected a forcible entrance. Of 
Neapolitan descent, and of a naval family, the 
legend affirms that in his youth he had been a 
corsair. Like so many able and disedifying 
ecclesiastics, Cossa took to the Church simply 
as to the profession most lucrative in honours 
and emoluments then open to genius. He 
studied law at Bologna, knew little of theol- 
ogy, did not pretend to be a saint, but was a 
valiant fighting man, who proved himself 
equal to the stern duties of Cardinal Legate 
when he had in hand the second Papal city, 
or was keeping back Ladislaus from Pisa. 
i To choose a pontiff ''altogether null and 
inept in things spirituar' has been called a 
grotesque incongruity on the part of Cardinals 
lately vociferating the need of reform. But 
John was acknowledged by all the States 
which had owned Alexander V. Several 



^^OBEDIENCES'' AND "NATIONS" 59 

months after his election he entered Rome 
(April, 1411) with his French ally, Louis of 
Anjou, at his side, the latter being now this 
Pope's candidate for Naples, and bent on its 
conquest. But though Louis gained the vic- 
tory of Rocca Secca, it profited him nothing. 
Ladislaus kept his crown; John made peace 
with him. Gregory XIL, at Rimini, found a 
champion in the one honourable and thor- 
oughly Christian prince of this decadent age. 
Carlo Malatesta. And now, at length, a clear 
field was discovered on which to end the 
Schism. On July 21, 1411, Sigismund of 
Hungary, brother to the deposed Wenceslaus, 
became by the electors' unanimous vote King 
of the Romans. He allowed, and the Empire 
allowed with him, John's ostensible claim to 
the Papacy. But he determined that Chris- 
tendom should meet in council; he fixed on 
the city of Constance; and John, who foresaw 
what would happen to such a pontiff as him- 
self when brought to judgment, gave his un- 
willing adhesion. 

This Council of Constance, which opened 
on November 5, 1414, was not only the largest 
in point of attendance, lay and ecclesiastical, 
but also the most imposing ever held. As 
a great representative assembly, it exhibits 
the Church and State of the Middle Ages 



60. PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

in a magnificent array of pomp and power. 
It was the Parliament of the West, deahng 
with rival Popes, defining dogma, putting 
down heresies, contemplating reform in head 
and members of the religious institution which 
it ruled over during three eventful years. 
Constance became the capital city of Eu- 
rope. It was a fair, a camp, a forum of de- 
bate, diversified with ceremonial as august 
as Roman and mediaeval tradition could 
prescribe. One hundred thousand persons 
thronged into the little town and neighbour- 
hood. They were well-managed, with excel- 
lent order in most things. Civilization had 
made great strides when the European na- 
tions could thus meet peaceably and decorum 
be so finely observed. 

The Council went through dramatic vicissi- 
tudes. It brought in from Paris University 
the method of voting by nations — in this 
instance the German, French, English, and 
Italian, to which Aragon was added later 
• — thereby depriving John XXIII. of his 
chief support, the Roman and other prelates 
who would have formed an hierarchical 
majority. John fled from Constance on 
March 20, 1415. But Sigismund held firm. 
The Council would not break up. Ten days 
elapsed, and Cardinal Zabarella proclaimed 



"OBEDIENCES" AND "NATIONS" 61 

the famous decree of the Fourth Session, 
which declared the Council superior to the 
Pope. Although D'Ailly was not present, we 
must attribute this revolutionary Gallican 
dogma to him and his French associates, Ger- 
son and Filastre. The Cardinals, recruited 
from all three "obediences," protested in ac- 
cord with tradition that apart from the Ro- 
man Church a Council had no authority. 
Frederick of Austria, hitherto John's friend, 
submitted under compulsion to Sigismund. 
John himself, whose conduct betrayed a 
broken spirit, and who had promised to abdi- 
cate, was now charged with crimes of every 
colour, and on May 29, 1415, was deposed. 
The long indictment, founded to some extent 
on hearsay, he would neither read nor answer. 
We may believe that much of it is untrue. On 
July 4, 1415, Gregory XII., by his proctor, 
Malatesta, handed in his own resignation after 
constituting the Council in a formal Bull. 
This, on Roman principles, gave the Fathers 
a status which they had not possessed until 
then. At last the Holy See was manifestly 
vacant; for no one heeded Benedict XIII. at 
Peniscola, though his actual deprivation did 
not take place until July 26, 1417. 

At Constance, therefore, the Gallican 
movement won; and by the decree "Fre- 



62 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

quens," it was now resolved that from hence- 
forth Councils to be called every five years 
should govern the Church. It was an innova- 
tion without precedent in East or West. On 
the other hand, a movement destined to be 
much more formidable, beginning in England 
with Wycliffe, and then alive in Bohemia, was 
the subject of stern repression. Wycliffe 
had "attacked in unmeasured terms the 
foundations of the ecclesiastical system,'^ 
as Creighton allows; and "it was felt that 
he threatened the existence of the Church, 
and even of civil society.'' His "Lollards'* 
were associated in popular opinion, but still 
more in the eyes of authority, with all the 
disorders which vexed JEngland, leading to 
Archbishop Sudbury's murder, and menacing 
rank, property, the Crown itself. Their 
petition to Parliament in 1395 denounced 
the Mass, the celibacy of the clergy, prayers 
for the dead, auricular confession, monastic 
vows. Rome had gone astray, England, 
they said, had followed her example. In 
1397 Archbishop Arundel condemned eight- 
een propositions of Wycliffe. In 1401, on 
petition from the clergy. Parliament enacted 
the clause, "de heretico comburendo," and 
William Sautre was burnt as a heretic. The 
nation pronounced against LoUardy. But 



"OBEDIENCES" AND "NATIONS" 63 

it had already migrated to Bohemia, where 
the flourishing University of Prague became 
its headquarters. A doctrine which meant 
nothing less than subversion of dogma, 
discipline, and authority, as hitherto recog- 
nized by Catholic Church and Christian 
State, was not likely to be suffered at Con- 
stance. All the world knows under what 
affecting, as well as much-debated, circum- 
stances John Hus and Jerome of Prague 
met their fiery doom, Hus on July 6, 1415, 
Jerome on May 30, 1416. According to the 
judicial procedure which then prevailed, 
their trial was fair and their sentence merited. 
Gregory XII. died in October, 1417. On 
St. Martin's Day, November 11, the Car- 
dinals and their appointed associates elected 
Oddo Colonna, belonging to the illustrious 
and turbulent Roman house which had with- 
stood so many Popes and insulted Boniface 
VIII. at Anagni. The new Pontiff, Martin 
v., was admirable in character and blameless 
in conduct. He approved now of what had 
been done ^^conciliariter," that is to say, in 
obedience to Catholic principles, by this 
long-continued assembly, and, dissolving it 
on April 22, 1418, put an end to the Great 
Schism, though Benedict's last followers held 
out until 1429. 



CHAPTER II 

FROM CONSTANCE TO THE SACK OF ROME 
(1417-1527, SAVONAROLA, ON "tHE 

church's downfall") 

When Martin V. confirmed the rules of the 
Roman Chancery, which he did without de- 
lay, his action put off all serious amendment 
of abuses until another Council, that of 
Trent, utterly opposed in spirit to Constance, 
undertook the task, by which time, in Biblical 
language, Israel had been rent from Judah. 
When the new Pope set out for Florence 
and Rome, he was moving towards a world 
into which German ideas could not penetrate, 
and where German grievances would be 
unheeded. Coming up from South and East, 
the mighty wave of Renaissance was to lift 
the Church and carry the century forward 
upon its bosom, in brilliant sunshine. Italy, 
said Filelfo, was to present the spectacle of 
a second Magna Grsecia, in art and letters 
unrivalled by the "Barbarians" north of the 
Alps; while Rome, for the first and last 

64 



TO THE SACK OF ROIME 65 

time, appeared as a modern Athens, the 
capital of learning and of civilization at its 
highest point since the age of the Antonines; 
in general culture supreme. "The eminence 
of the Papacy consisted at that time," says 
F. X. Kraus, "in its leadership of Europe 
in the province of art." But the same writer 
grants elsewhere that, when Medicean Rome 
drew admiration to its marvels, "the re- 
ligious and moral point of view was ignored 
in this domain of worldly aims and ideas." 
From such a mingled Renaissance to the 
Sack of Rome in 1527, the stages of righteous 
tragedy, purifying as by fire the rebellious 
and sinful people with their rulers, may be 
plainly followed, as in some prophecy of the 
Old Testament. It is foreshadowed by 
Savonarola's canzone of 1475 on "The 
Church's Downfall." 

There is another general tendency worth 
observing. Mediaeval Europe had cherished 
freedom. Its feudal services, chartered privi- 
leges, popular franchises. Parliaments and 
Diets, had restrained the sovereign power. 
Not even the Holy See could escape censure 
and sometimes vehement opposition from 
representative bodies. All this was rapidly 
changing. The quarrels of Armagnacs and 



66 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

Burgundians, the English invasion and loss 
of France, did but seem to justify Louis XI. 
in exercising absolute rule. The Wars of 
the Roses destroyed an old aristocracy to 
make room for a new one, while giving to the 
Tudors a dominion the alternative of which 
was anarchy. Among Italians this period 
is the "Age of the Tyrants" — ^men like 
Francesco Sforza, who rose to be Duke of 
Milan; like the Malatesta at Rimini, the 
Baglioni at Perugia, the Estensian princes 
of Ferrara, the Bentivogli at Bologna; and 
pre-eminent in all the arts, villanies, and 
accomplishments needful for so perilous a 
task, the Medici, who did not yet call them- 
selves Lords of Florence, but with Augustan 
dexterity ruled as if over free citizens. From 
the Assembly of Pisa, in 1409, till the last 
vestiges of the Schism at Basle melted away 
in 1449, has also been termed the "Age of 
the Councils.'' But its end was defeat, 
inflicted on the parliamentary or constitu- 
tional idea, which Gerson would have substi- 
tuted for the Papal Monarchy. Pisa, Con- 
stance, Basle left the Pope unlimited sway 
among the world-powers which were not less 
bent on striking down opposition. Not until 
the Puritans rallied to a conception which 



TO THE SACK OF ROME 67 

won its triumph at Naseby in 1645, did it 
seem possible to overthrow the Roman, 
without enhancing the Royal supremacy. 

But Martin V. also began, however cau- 
tiously, a counter-movement to the classic 
Republican spirit, which Rienzi had stirred 
up and which survived him. The Popes 
now aimed steadily at becoming masters 
in their own capital; and they succeeded. 
A still more difficult but imperative duty, 
if they were to feel themselves independent, 
was the reduction of local tyrants under their 
yoke — or a real, and not merely nominal, 
grasp of the Papal States. In this under- 
taking it was likewise their fortune to prosper, 
and by the strangest means. They became 
effective temporal sovereigns at the very 
moment when their spiritual jurisdiction 
was cast aside by one-half of Christendom, 
exactly the reverse of that which was to hap- 
pen in 1870. All these converging events 
meet in the same decisive era. When Clem- 
ent VII. came back to Rome in 1528, and 
crowned Charles V. at Bologna, the year fol- 
lowing, two series of opposed developments 
in history were fixed and certain. The Prot- 
estant Reformation was to run its course; 
the Popes were to become unchecked sover- 



68 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

eigns of Rome — which no enemy would 
capture, and only one for an instant approach, 
during the two hundred and sixty years which 
preceded the opening of States General at 
Versailles, May 4, 1789. 

In 1419, Rome and Benevento were held 
by Joan II., Queen of Naples. Bologna 
had declared itself a free Republic. By 
granting the Queen investiture and making 
terms with Braccio, then the rival brigand 
to Sforza of Attendolo, Pope Martin V. 
was enabled to take possession of the Eter- 
nal City, ^' devastated by pestilence, famine, 
sword, and revolt,'' on September 30, 1420. 
He found ruins on every side, a scanty 
population, the Vatican gardens waste, and 
the walls about St. Peter's broken down. 
Martin restored St. John Lateran as well 
as other churches; built for himself a mod- 
est palace on the Quirinal; and inaugu- 
rated, by his patronage of Gentile and Ma- 
saccio, the decorative works which were 
to transform this "city of cowherds" into 
the most beautiful of European capitals. 
He left the municipal liberties of Rome 
untouched. But he put down brigandage; 
recovered Perugia in 1424 and Bologna in 
1429, and was a model Pope, save only 



TO THE SACK OF ROME 69 

that he greatly aggrandized the house of 
Colonna. Papal families were now to play 
their splendid, but too often disastrous and 
even criminal part, on the Roman stage, 
in presence of a scandalized world. It has 
been fairly argued that by promoting his 
kinsfolk the Pontiff made sure of ministers 
on whom he could rely, and that nepotism 
helped him to keep in check the Roman 
Patricians, most insolent and lawless of 
their kind. The story, however, may be 
allowed to preach its own moral, both good 
and bad. There was little need to exalt 
the Colonna, whose cup of wickedness had 
not yet been filled to the brim. 

Reluctantly enough, Martin V., who had 
reconciled Aragon and so cleared away the 
last remnants of schism, allowed the promised 
Council to meet at Basle. Cardinal Cesarini, 
learned and high-minded, was to preside over 
its discussions. Eugenius IV. succeeded 
Martin, being a Venetian, a friar of St. 
Francis, a strict and saintly man, but no 
politician. The Council opened July 23, 
1431. In December, Eugenius dissolved it. 
But this democratic meeting, where bishops 
found themselves jostled, says iEneas Sylvius, 
by cooks and stable-boys, renewed the de- 



70 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

crees of Constance, summoned and jBnally 
deposed the Pope, though undoubtedly legit- 
imate, usurped his government in Avignon, 
laid taxes on the Church at large, and may 
be called in ecclesiastical annals the Long 
Parliament, for it went on during eighteen 
years, till 1449. Recognized for a while 
by the secular powers, alternately approved 
and condemned by Eugenius, it made the 
*' compacts'' which brought peace to Bo- 
hemia, where Ziska and his Taborites waged 
a sanguinary contest. 

i Sigismund, like the Pope, was now with 
the Council and now against it. But when 
Amadeus of Savoy had been elected on these 
new and revolutionary principles at Basle 
as Felix V., he proved to be the last of the 
Antipopes. Eugenius, headstrong but honest, 
was driven from Rome in 1434, and took 
refuge in Florence. By degrees the old 
Catholic idea to which, under extreme 
difficulties, he remained faithful, won back 
from the tumults and ineptitudes of Basle 
moderate men like Cesarini, Cusa, and ^Eneas 
Sylvius. The Pope at Ferrara and Florence 
received from the Greek Emperor, now 
desperately seeking help against the Turks, 
an enforced homage. For one moment the 



TO THE SACK OF ROME 71 

Churches of East and West joined in the 
same profession of faith. But even at this, 
their hour of doom, the Greek people would 
not accept the Union. There was no hope 
of saving Constantinople after the fatal 
day of Varna (1444) in which Cesarini fell, 
and the Christian host was cut to pieces. 
Eugenius went back to Rome and died 
there. Few pontiffs had undergone greater 
humiliations; but he was the last whom 
Roman violence compelled to flee from the 
Eternal City until Pius IX. quitted it in 
1848. And the Long Parhament at Basle 
did not succeed in its endeavour to substitute 
for the Pope an oligarchy or a democracy, 
as surpeme over the Church. 

From henceforth the Conciliar movement 
was dead. Reform, still desired by Germans, 
pursued later on with apostolic zeal by 
Cardinal Cusa in his thrice-famous Visitation 
(1451), did not much trouble the conscience 
of Italy, now absorbed in its vision of the 
ancient classic world. Florence, under its 
Medicean rulers, became a centre of Greek 
studies, of art grandly imagined, of litera- 
ture, both Latin and Tuscan, as well as of 
a Paganism slightly or not at all disguised. 
The Papacy itseK, which had employed 



72 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

Humanist scholars, but without enthusiasm, 
in the days of Martin and Eugenius, took 
on the air of a liberal university when 
Nicholas V. was elected. Nicholas reigned 
only eight years (1447-1455). But he 
wrought wonders in that brief space. He 
planned and partly executed the design of 
laying out Rome as an architectural whole. 
He began the Vatican palace, did much to 
restore St. Peter's, and gave the Leonine City 
its present shape. He was resolved to 
identify the Christian religion with art and 
learning. By the execution of Porcaro in 
1452 he put an end to all hopes of a Roman 
Republic. During the next seventy years 
Rome, politically no longer free, was to lead 
Europe in the paths of the Renaissance, 
to be "'the true seat and home of all Latin 
culture,'' or as Erasmus described it, "'the 
common country of learned men." Medi- 
seval and modern thought came together; 
but in the first raptures which followed on 
the discovery of noble antique art, and when 
scholasticism had decayed into pedantry 
or barbarism, more than a little wrong was 
done to the earlier Middle Age. Southern 
nations were instinctively breaking away 
from the Teutons, English, and Scandina- 



TO THE SACK OF ROME 73 

vians, by their preference of the Latin civil- 
ization before the less brilliant but more 
profound, if still narrow, conceptions which 
were afterwards to be called Puritan. During 
the whole period between Nicholas V. and 
the Council of Trent, monastic ideals under- 
went an eclipse. 

But in helping to form one great synthesis 
where all the perfect achievements of human- 
ity might blend with religion and give it 
glory, the Popes were obeying right reason. 
As in the year 800 Pope Leo III. created 
a new Roman Empire on the ruins of the 
old, thereby offering to Franks and Teutons 
a principle of unity which served its pur- 
pose until the tribes of the Barbarians were 
ripening into nations, so during the half 
century between Nicholas V. and Leo X., 
they did a bolder thing — they accepted the 
Greek idea of culture. This, when we reflect 
on the peculiar cast of tradition and policy 
at Rome, was infinitely more daring than to 
make of Charlemagne a Western Caesar. 
For Christianity and civilization are each 
ideal wholes, self-centred and self -sustained. 
Accordingly, the Middle Ages end when the 
Renaissance begins. That Higher Synthesis 
of Rome and Athens could not be effected 



74 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

without powers of mind, without moral 
earnestness greatly enhanced beyond any 
to which the fifteenth century might lay 
claim. It was from many points of view a 
decadent era. Its attempts at philosophy 
were feeble. Cardinal Cusa was but a link 
between the mystic reveries of Tauler, the 
Dominican, and later German theosophies, 
such as Jacob Behmen's; he did not possess 
the true notion of history. In like manner 
at Florence Marsilius Ficinus translated 
Plato and dreamt that he was reviving 
Platonism; but he sacrificed reason to 
Alexandrian dreams. The princes of Italy 
treated literature mainly as an adornment of 
their courts, and art as the splendid frame- 
work of their shows, their intrigues, and 
their ambitions. 

To the Popes we may ascribe, as a dynasty, 
loftier aims. When at command of Julius II., 
in 1508, Raflfaelle began to fresco the walls 
of the Camera della Segnatura, he gave, 
under the Vatican roof, an expression which 
remains to this day of the great reconciling 
thought, in itself justified, that antiquity 
has furnished a fit prelude to the Christian 
Faith by its poets, philosophers, men of 
science, and supreme artists. The Sistine 



TO THE SACK OF ROME 75 

Chapel repeats and enforces the lesson. 
Dating from Sixtus IV. (1473), under whom 
its walls were painted by Florentine and 
Umbrian pencils — by Botticelli, Ghirlandajo, 
Perugino, and others — it became the scene 
of Michael Angelo's triumph in design, in 
teaching, in magnificent harmonies of thought 
as of colour, between 1508 and 1512. Three 
dispensations are illustrated within this Papal 
precinct — the Old Testament leading up 
to the New, and the Sibyls, as Divine mes- 
sengers among the heathen, confronting 
the prophets of Israel. Facing the unknown 
future rises before us that tremendous 
symbolic picture of the Last Judgment 
(painted 1534-41), which in its dreadful 
outlines was to be accompHshed on Church 
and State as the years went forward. But 
who can misconstrue the announcement thus 
perpetuated of a superhuman idea, in which 
Rome signifies unity, and all the ways of 
progress meet at its Golden IVIilestone.^ 

As eight hundred years earher the con- 
quests of Mohammed's Heutenants had given 
to CathoKc Rome a victory over Syrian and 
Egyptian sectaries, so now by the destruction 
of the Greek Empire a second Mohammed 
turned the course of civilized mankind 



76 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

definitely westward. Constantinople fell in 
1453, suddenly, not without heroism. Di- 
vided Europe had surrendered the Queen 
City to be trampled on by Turkish hordes. 
In 1204 the filibustering expedition known 
as the Fourth Crusade, disobeying Innocent 
III., had captured New Rome, hitherto in- 
violate. A succession of Latin Emperors 
till 1261; feudal chiefs whom their subjects 
detested; the commerce and rivalries which 
were exercised by Venetians and Genoese; 
the great robber-bands from Spain, celebrated 
as the Catalan Company — all these elements 
combined to weaken that first line of Chris- 
tian defence. The Popes were wilHng to aid 
Byzantium if it would grant precedence 
to the Vatican. But it never would, and 
the disunion of the Churches opened a breach 
in the walls of Valens through which Mo- 
hammed II. entered. He made of Turkey a 
European State. He became suzerain over 
Greek Christians and appointed their Patri- 
arch. He meditated on the exploits of Alex- 
ander; he was resolved to conquer the whole 
West; and by his subjugation of Servia and 
the Morea, by his raid on Otranto, he proved 
that it could be promisingly attempted. 
He died in 1481. 



TO THE SACK OF ROME 77 

Meanwhile, the Papal throne had been 
occupied by a fiery Spaniard, CaHxtus III. 
(1455-1458); a man of letters, Pius II. 
(1458-1464) ; a Venetian dilettante, Paul II. 
(1464-1471) ; and a Franciscan friar of Genoa, 
Sixtus IV. (1471-1484), all of whom professed 
that the Crusade against Islam was their 
dearest concern. EiKope would not be con- 
vinced. The Spaniard, whose name was 
Borgia, sent funds and preachers to Hunyadi, 
sent him the legate Carvajal, the astonishing 
friar, John Capistrano; and thus enabled 
the Magyar hero to reheve Belgrade (July, 
1456), though he died of the plague a month 
later. The Turks lost fifty thousand men; 
but they annexed Servia, Bosnia, Herzego- 
vina. Pius II., who had been ^Eneas Sylvius, 
journaHst, adventurer, statesman, cardinal, 
and Pope, interesting as a modern figure and 
forerunner of Erasmus, displayed the rare 
quahty of a genius that grew with circum- 
stances. He was enthusiastic for the Holy 
War; but his early escapades, the frequent 
diversion of crusading taxes to purposes 
neither good nor lawful, and the criminal 
adherence of Venice to Mohammed's pohcy, 
defeated Pius, who showed in his travels 
to Mantua and his death-journey to Ancona 



78 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

qualities which demand our admiration. 
Paul II., a fine character, misunderstood by 
the Italian Courts, which never dreamt that 
a Pope could be an honourable man, did his 
utmost to encourage Scanderbeg, otherwise 
George of Albania, who for ten years defended 
lUyria, foiled the Turk, and stood between 
Venice and Mohammed. George died in 
1467. Negropont (Euboea) was lost in 1470. 
But the Sultan's decease gave to the Knights 
of St. John at Rhodes a breathing-space 
of forty years (besieged 1480; surrendered 
1522). 

Section II 

SECULAR POMP AND SPIRITUAL DECAY 

(1471-1527) 

We come now to an outwardly brilliant but 
in itseK deplorable episode of Vatican history 
which, though in some sense relieved by 
the feats and glories of Julius II., fills the 
period commencing with Sixtus IV. (1471), 
and cannot be held to have terminated before 
the double Sack of Rome (May-September, 
1527). These sixty years witnessed a degra- 
dation of the Papacy into a mere Italian 
princedom, while its sacred prerogatives were 



POMP AND DECAY 79 

employed as "reasons of State/' with scandal 
to present and after ages. Yet we must be 
on our guard, as De Quincey points out 
when deahng with Cicero and his times, 
against "that masquerade of misrepresenta- 
tion which invariably accompanied the polit- 
ical eloquence of Rome/' Calumny more 
atrocious than was practised by pamphlet- 
eers, ambassadors, diarists, biographers, and 
literary men at large, during the Humanist 
Era, it is impossible to imagine. For a long 
while it was taken as true, and especially 
since religious opinions were affected by it. 
Now we understand that no statement, even 
if it defames the Borgias, can be admitted 
without scrutiny, or when wanting in con- 
firmation. Monstrous caricatures, designed 
for the ends of faction, ought not to be looked 
upon as faithful portraits. 

Moreover, it should be remembered, to the 
credit of Vatican diplomacy, that the Popes 
aimed at Italian independence of the foreigner, 
and that they were bound to make of the 
Papal States a power which could maintain 
itself erect between Naples and Milan on one 
side, Florence and Venice on the other. Their 
policy changed with bewildering suddenness; 
but its motive was generally apparent and, 



80 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

though sadly too often self-regarding, it led 
at a critical moment to the end they had in 
view. Thanks to their persistent efforts, 
Rome was not absorbed in the French or the 
Spanish Empire. For nearly three centuries 
it remained the one free spot in Southern 
Europe, as Holland became the free meeting- 
place of the Protestant North. 

From 1471, therefore, down to 1527, is a 
chapter of Roman and Papal story which 
bears the most curious resemblance to that 
of the Caesars who followed Augustus and 
preceded Trajan. It finds in Guicciardini 
some depraved imitation of Tacitus; in the 
diaries of Infessura scandals which would 
have pleased Suetonius by their enormity 
— ^perhaps of lying as well as of delineation 
• — and in Machiavelli such perverted wisdom 
mingled with sublimer traits as to remind us 
of Seneca, Nero's panegyrist and victim. Let 
us not forget, however, that genius of the 
highest rank has immortalized a period 
abounding in vital energy no less than in 
crime. Italy brought forth not only politi- 
cians who gave to Europe shrewd and wicked 
counsels, but poets, painters, sculptors, ora- 
tors, explorers, among whom we may range 
from Ariosto, Leonardo da Vinci, Michael 



POMP AND DECAY 81 

Angelo, Titian, Raffaelle, to Columbus and 
Amerigo Vespucci. Italian greatness, on 
every line except that of military skill, is 
incontestable. It was hereafter to equal in 
the Catholic Reformation the mighty works 
which it did under the impulse of revived an- 
tiquity. Nothing to compare with Italian art 
has been achieved since Michael Angelo's de- 
cline. No modern cities — we will doubtfully 
except Paris — have made on the world such 
a deep impression of beauty, life, and power 
as Venice, Florence, Rome. The Renais- 
sance triumphed in these marble palaces and 
squares, on the shores of Tiber and Arno, 
amid the gleaming lagoons, as never since or 
before. But it was a time of moral anarchy, 
which iEgidius of Viterbo sums up in the 
strong words, "Aurum, vis, Venus imperita- 
bat." Violent desire, violent achievement 
mark that age. 

Alonzo Borgia, who became Calixtus III., 
was born in 1378, the year of the Schism. 
A Catalan by descent, he sided with Bene- 
dict XIII., but afterwards acknowledged Pope 
Martin. His services to the King of Aragon 
in governing Naples gave him dignity, and 
with his election Spanish vigour but Spanish 
truculence also ruled the Sacred College. 



82 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

He created in 1456 two of his nephews 
Cardinals, giving them his family name — 
Rodrigo, afterwards Alexander VI. (born 
1431), a youth of twenty-five; and Luis 
Juan, still younger. He made Pedro Luis, 
who was not in orders, Captain-General of 
the Church, Governor of St. Peter's patri- 
mony, the district adjoining Rome, and 
Prefect of the City. Rodrigo was appointed 
legate (that is. Papal resident) in Ancona 
and Bologna; he then appeared as Vice- 
Chancellor, second in authority to the Pope; 
and during the next forty-seven years he is a 
leading man in the Curia and above it. 
Calixtus claimed the kingdom of Naples, 
chiefly that he might bestow on Pedro Luis 
the principalities of Terracina and Beneven- 
tum. History calls this method of govern- 
ment "'nepotism.'' It enabled the Pontiff at 
once to exalt his own family, to keep a hold 
on the temporal power which was always 
slipping away into the hands of local tyrants, 
to resist the great Roman houses, and to feel 
at home in the Vatican. Its disadvantages 
are equally apparent; it lowered the Papal 
prestige; it gave rise to infinite abuses; it 
was the origin of many wars and of continual 
plots and counterplots; nor can it be said of 



POMP AND DECAY 83 

the two most conspicuous groups of Cardinals 
and lay-rulers whom it produced in the 
hey-day of the Renaissance, that they were 
anything else than a calamity to the Church 
and to Christendom. 

These were the Catalan house of Borgia, 
and the Genoese house of Riario-Rovere. 
A third line of nepotism starts with Gio- 
vanni dei Medici, son of Lorenzo the Magnifi- 
cent, who was Cardinal at fourteen (March, 
1489), and who became Leo X., to be suc- 
ceeded by his cousin Giulio, the unhappy 
Clement VIL Thus Naples, which was de- 
pendent on Spain, Genoa which commonly 
yielded to French influence, and Florence 
identified with the Medici, exercised in turn 
the immense poUtical, financial, and spiritual 
powers, now that all hopes of reform had 
died away, of a secularized Popedom. Efforts 
were made to break up this concentrated 
sovereignty, sometimes by the Colonna, 
again by the Orsini, representing old feudal 
brigandages; or yet again by Cardinals like 
Ascanio Sforza, who was Milan's ambassador 
in the Sacred College. But they were all 
baffled and came to naught. 

The striking group, Riario-Rovere, sprang 
from a humble folk at Savona. Its founder. 



84 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

Sixtus IV. (1471-1484), had been General of 
the Franciscans. He was learned in mediaeval 
fashion, devout, and personally blameless. 
But his sudden elevation to the Papacy 
impaired his judgment, while the favours 
which he lavished on his nephews amazed 
even a corrupt world. The riches, honours, 
vices, and pleasures of Pedro Riario, "a 
mendicant friar made Croesus," Cardinal at 
twenty-five, consumed by his intemperance at 
twenty-eight (December, 1471-March, 1474), 
take the reader back to Sejanus and cast over 
Sixtus IV. the shadow of Tiberius. Another 
nephew, Girolamo, tyrannized Rome in the 
Pope's name, trampled down the Colonna, 
married the virago of Milan, Caterina Sforza, 
got from Sixtus Imola and Forli, and was 
murdered as a "second Nero'' by his own 
guard (April 14, 1488), who flung his naked 
corpse out of the palace window. 

But the great man of whom Sixtus might 
well be proud was Julian della Rovere, also 
a friar, member of the Sacred College at 
twenty-eight (1471), and declared Pope 
Julius II. in 1503. Created archbishop of 
Avignon and Bologna, bishop of Lausanne, 
Coutance, and other widely-scattered sees, 
abbot of Nonantola and Grotta Ferrata, 



POMP AND DECAY 85 

this young man, for whose sake the Canon 
Law and the claims of the electors were so 
shamelessly flung aside, was not without some 
sparks of nobility. He stands high above 
all the Popes that have reigned since the 
Middle Ages, and by his determined action, in 
which nepotism had no place, the Papal States 
were at length permanently established. Six- 
tus, who rode roughshod over ItaKan schemes 
and poKcies, was, in MachiavelU's opinion, 
"'the first Pope who began to show the extent 
of the Papal power.'' He left Bohemia and 
Hungary to themselves. He did nothing to 
stem the Ottoman advance. In the splen- 
dom*s, architectural and spectacular, of this 
son of St. Francis we feel that a Nemesis 
lurks, and that the "Eternal Gospel" will 
take its revenge. 

To what extent Sixtus may be held re- 
sponsible for the treachery and sacrilege com- 
bined which make up the conspiracy called 
"of the Pazzi," is a question that has been 
vehemently debated. On April 26, 1478, 
Giuliano dei Medici was brutally slain, and 
Leonardo woimded, during High Mass in the 
Duomo at Florence. A plot to overthrow 
their government had been discussed before 
the Pope, who considered Lorenzo his enemy. 



86 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

and was approved by him; but he said, "I 
do not wish the death of any man on my 
account/' Sixtus cannot have known the 
details of the assassination beforehand, or 
that it would take place in Sta. Maria del 
Fiore, since all this was arranged suddenly 
and after another plan had been given up. 
i/'It is, however, deeply to be regretted," says 
Pastor, "that a Pope should play any part 
in the history of a conspiracy/' His friends 
not only failed to oust the Medici from 
Florence; they suffered instantly for their 
evil deeds; and Salviati, archbishop of 
Pisa, who went to seize the Palazzo Pubblico, 
was himself seized and hanged from one of 
its windows. These atrocious scenes, char- 
acteristic of Italian politics, were but an 
instance of that which in every city through- 
out the Peninsula might be witnessed when 
parties were engaged in conflict. We shall 
not in our pages do more than allude to them; 
but they were constantly enacted and must 
not be forgotten. 

Passing over the insignificant yeari^ of 
Innocent VIII. (1484-1492), who was merely 
intent on aggrandizing his children's estate, 
we come to the election, bought with money 
and promises, of Rodrigo Borgia, who took. 



POMP AND DECAY 87 

as he said, the name of the "invincible 
Alexander" (August 10, 1492). Singularly 
handsome and dignified in person, frank to 
cynicism, astute, indefatigable, good-natured 
and unscrupulous, Alexander was hailed 
like a demigod at his coming in. Of him and 
of Juhus II. one has said excellently that they 
were Emperors rather than Popes, f This 
Borgia left his name hanging like a thunder- 
cloud over the Vatican. He has a legend 
so black that to reKeve it of a single stain 
may be deemed apologizing for iniquity. 
Yet no pontiff could have dared such crime 
or earned such an infamous reputation had 
the Rome, the Italy of his day, not condoned 
or even admired his "magnificence in sin." 

Alexander was no hypocrite. Beautiful 
and strong, with fierce primitive instincts, he 
answered to some old pagan ideal, cherished 
by the Southern imagination. That he had 
not the virtue of a priest and did not trouble 
himself concerning the Church's welfare; that 
he was an open profligate who turned the 
sacred palace into a Pompeian house of 
pleasure; that he made his bastard son 
a Cardinal, and entrusted the government of 
the Vatican to his bastard daughter, Lucrezia; 
that murder seemed to dog his footsteps; 



88 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

and that the foulest wickedness was thought 
credible when reported of him — who is there 
that has not read these things? We may 
take Lord Acton's estimate, which would be 
fair, even though domestic sacrileges and 
tragedies had been wanting in the chronicle. 
"Alexander,'^ he says, "fills a great space in 
history, because he so blended his spiritual 
and temporal authority as to apply the re- 
sources of the one to the purposes of the 
other.'' He was an Italian sovereign who 
made the Church a means to accomplish 
political, nay personal, ends. 

This indefinite, unconquerable power it 
was which, as the Borgias applied it, roused 
Machiavelli's admiration, not without a sense 
of terror. His model ''Prince," consummate 
in strategy, striking hard and aiming high, 
pure intellect unfettered by a sense of crime, 
was Caesar Borgia. Csesar (1475-1507), 
Roman Cardinal, French duke, captain of 
cut-throats, putter down of tyrants, ran in 
his short life through so many vicissitudes, 
grim and gay, between the altar, the camp, 
the throne, and the prison, that it is not 
easy to believe he was only in his thirty- 
second year when he fell fighting at the siege 
of Navarrese Viana. So perfect an exemplar 



POMP AND DECAY 89 

of Renaissance beauty, craft, and violence 
did this splendid youth appear to be that 
the Malatesta, Baglioni, Medici paled beside 
him. Caesar Borgia subdued Alexander VI. 
himself, as though he were a sardonic 
Mephisto scorning the too-facile emotions of 
Faust. In that world where Law and Gospel 
served but as a two-edged sword of earthly 
dominion, these men prospered. It was their 
hour, and the power of darkness. 

A regular drama now begins, falling into 
three acts, which we might name Charles 
VIII., Savonarola, Caesar Borgia. Over 
against them Kes the vast New World, 
touched as in a dream by Columbus (October 
12, 1492), which Alexander in three several 
documents assigned to Spain, subject to the 
rights of any other Christian communities, 
and provided that Portugal's monopoly of the 
African coast was not infringed. The Borgia 
Pope thus won for himself a place, where he 
is still to be seen giving his award, on the great 
gates of the Capitol at Washington. He 
was acting as CathoKc tradition warranted. 
But Italy, too, had become a New World, 
abounding in treasures of civilization, tempt- 
ing the less favoured peoples, or at least their 
sovereigns, to make of it a prey. France, con- 



90 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

solidated under Louis XI., had now gained 
Brittany by the somewhat shameful mar- 
riage of its Duchess Anne to Charles VIII. 
Charles, an ugly dwarf, but attractive, and 
by temperament a crusader, had claims 
through the house of Anjou on Naples, on the 
Holy Land. He was invited across the Alps 
by Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan, and 
reached Asti September 9, 1494. His advent, 
as a saviour and a scourge, had been foretold 
by Savonarola, whose mighty words were 
shaking Florence and Italy. 

Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498) was a 
Dominican, last of the great mediaeval friars, 
prophet and martyr of the Catholic Reforma- 
tion, which he did not live to see. Coming to 
Florence in 1481, his rudeness of speech (he 
was a native of Ferrara, not a Tuscan) 
gained him scanty audience. At San Gemi- 
gnano he beheld the vision of the sword over 
Italy; the Church was to be chastened and 
renewed. His sermons at Brescia, strongly 
marked by symbolism, were echoed far and 
wide; when he came back to Florence in 
1489 his lectures on the Apocalypse threw 
men into ecstasy, and he carried the people 
with him. The friar was not an obscurantist; 
but he mourned over the ruin of the Church; 



POMP AND DECAY 91 

he detested the wickedness of prelates and 
Cardinals; he spoke vehemently in condem- 
nation of the cancerous vices with which 
Humanism dealt so lightly; and he foresaw 
that a catastrophe was inevitable. Lorenzo 
dei Medici treated this new preacher with 
kindness; but Savonarola would not take 
his side. After Lorenzo's death, when the 
foolish Piero misgoverned Florence, the 
prophet announced coming woes in accents 
that struck terror; and on September 21 his 
text was "Behold, I bring a flood of waters 
upon the earth.'' It proclaimed that the 
French were in Italy. 

The Florentines sent ambassadors to 
Charles, among them Savonarola. November 
saw the Medici driven out and the French 
king received in state by a free people. 
Savonarola pressed upon Charles the duty 
of going to Rome and reforming the Church. 
Alexander, threatened with a General Council, 
admitted the King, who was overmatched 
in policy and yielded to him the obedi- 
ence of France. Charles' regiments con- 
quered Naples; Italy fell prostrate before 
him; then at Fornovo (July 5, 1495) he 
lost all that he gained. The French passed 
away like a vision of the night. Still Florence, 



92 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 
#& 

which was now all one with Savonarola, 
clung to the Gallic alliance. On the other 
ide Alexander formed the Italian League. 
He despised the sermons, though pointed at 
himseK, of the "chattering friar," but he was 
resolute in capturing the city on the Arno 
for his projects. He called Fra Girolamo to 
Rome, and, on his disobedience, found osten- 
sible motives to silence, excommunicate, and 
degrade the prophet, whom Florence now 
rejected as violently as she had followed him. 
Trial, torture, execution upon a high gibbet 
too much resembling a cross — such were the 
rewards of Savonarola for preaching righteous- 
ness under Alexander VI. (May 23, 1498). 

Two acts of the play were played out; the 
Pope had triumphed over king and friar. 
Turning as with a flash, Alexander took up 
the French alliance in 1499, to defeat which 
in 1498 he had burnt Fra Girolamo. His 
eldest son, the Duke of Gandia, had been 
murdered and flung into the Tiber; accord- 
ingly Csesar Borgia threw off the Cardinal's 
robes and became a layman that he might 
found a dynasty in Romagna to which the 
Papal succession could be attached. Long 
ago the house of Theophylact had annexed to 
itself the Holy See for more than eighty years. 



POMP AND DECAY 93 

Why should not the house of Borgia do as 
much? Caesar went on embassy to Louis XII. 
at Chinon; he married Charlotte of Navarre, 
being now Duke of Valentinois; and when 
Louis entered Milan as a conqueror (Octo- 
ber 6, 1499), the Pope's captain-general set 
about reducing the tyrant lords of Romagna 
with a nondescript army of hired ruffians, 
French, Spaniards, and Italians. 

Caesar captured Faenza, menaced Florence, 
and was bought off with a large ransom, while 
Alexander blessed the partition of Naples be- 
tween France and Spain, humbled the Co- 
lonna, and had his daughter Lucrezia married 
to Alfonso d'Este. On the last day of De- 
cember, 1502, Caesar had all his worst enemies 
in hand at Sinigaglia. Having taken them by 
a transcendent act of treachery, whom he 
would he slew; and the Pope, not to be more 
scrupulous, smote the rest of the Orsini, and 
left their Cardinal to die in Sant' Angelo. 
Men trembled and admired. There seemed 
no reason why Csesar should not make himself 
king of Italy. The French lost Naples 
again in May, 1503. In August Rome was 
visited with malarial fever. Alexander and 
Caesar both sickened of it. On August 18 
the Pope died, and with him every hope of 



94 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

a Borgia dynasty expired. On All Saints' 
Day, November 1, 1503, his life-long enemy, 
Julian della Rovere, was elected to St. Peter's 
Chair by an imanimous vote. Julius II. com- 
pelled Caesar to yield up all his conquests and 
castles. The once invincible chief took ser- 
vice under his father-in-law, the King of 
Navarre, and though he died bravely, came 
to an inglorious end. His epic or epitaph we 
may consider was written by Machiavelli in 
the "Prince,'' which raises political science 
"beyond good and evil,'' to a height of wis- 
dom or infamy. 

JuHus II. had spent his storm-tost days 
chiefly in the service of France, to whose 
martial enterprising genius he felt allied. We 
might describe him shortly as the Antipope 
of Avignon (where his escutcheons and 
monuments remain) while Alexander VI. 
anathematized him at Rome. He made an 
indifferent friar, a disedifying bishop, and a 
great Pope. His unvarnished tongue, rough 
Genoese vigour, contempt for literary grim- 
aces, and large designs, reveal the soldier- 
pontiff, whom Italy should have taken for its 
king. He was neither honest nor virtuous; 
but he knew how to rule better than his brutal 
cousin, Girolamo Riario; and unlike Alex- 



POMP AND DECAY 95 

ander VI. he had no family ambition. While 
trafficking in sacred things, and purchasing 
his own election by lavish engagements, he 
put forth a Bull which condemned simony, 
with eflfective though tardy consequences. 
But his eminent fame is due to actions of a 
mixed baseness and grandeur. Julius II. 
had noble aspirations. He meant the Holy 
See to enjoy freedom and Italy to see the 
Barbarians turn their backs. One power 
alone hindered this consummation — stealthy, 
politic, grasping Venice, which, in the tremu- 
lous equilibrium of five States and a score of 
principalities, pursued its fatal idea of acquir- 
ing a Terra Firma from the Alps to the Apen- 
nines. Venice never gave up its attempts on 
Ravenna, Rimini, and the old '^Pentapolis,'* 
which had been given to the Apostolic See by 
Pepin as long ago as 756. We must sadly own 
that the Republic of St. Mark, by its foolish 
and unjust measures to keep that which did 
not belong to it, rumed Italian freedom. 

Juhus II. was not a man to be trifled with. 
He formed the League of Cambray in 1508, 
after recovering Bologna from the Bentivogli. 
It aimed at nothing less than the partition of 
Venetian territories among the French, Ger- 
man, Spanish, and other allies, including the 



96 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

Pope. At Vaila the Republic suffered a 
crushing defeat (May 14, 1509) which is 
reckoned the beginning of its dechne, JuKus 
humbled the Venetians to the dust; he set up 
once more the States of the Church in Central 
Italy. Then he turned on his confederate 
Louis XII. He captured Mirandola, himself 
acting as general, failed at Ferrara, and might 
seem to be overwhelmed when young Gaston 
de Foix won the bloody battle of Ravenna, 
Easter Sunday, April 11, 1512. But Gaston 
was killed in the moment of victory; and 
Julius outmanoeuvred the French schismatics 
with his Lateran Council, got Bologna the sec- 
ond time, restored the Medici at Florence with 
Spanish help, not without frightful scenes 
at Prato, and died, February 20, 1513, the 
strongest Pope that was to be for centuries. 
He had driven out the French. They would 
return more than once, to be finally defeated 
by Spain, which was now rising to Imperial 
dominion on both sides of the Atlantic. 

Strange things were coming to pass. The 
nephew of Sixtus IV., whose endeavours to 
oust the Medici from Florence had involved 
him in conspiracy, and left to his apologists 
no tolerable burden, was now their restorer. 
His vacant throne would be occupied for 



POMP AND DECAY 97 

well-nigh twenty years by Leo X., the son of 
Lorenzo, and Clement VIL, son, but not 
legitimate, of the murdered Giuliano. Under 
the mild and seductive Leo (1513-1520) Rome 
enjoyed all that the Renaissance could give; 
it became ''the revel of the earth, the masque 
of Italy"; but a Pope who desired to be called 
"deliciae generis humani," — a Christian Em- 
peror Titus — was not made for success in 
politics or war. Leo treated with all the 
powers; practised Medicean arts of diplomacy 
to the utmost; but unluckily took sides 
against France when its new young king, 
Francis L, was on the eve of gaining the 
battle at Marignano where the Swiss in- 
fantry lost its invincible character (Septem- 
ber 14, 1515). He had no choice but to 
submit. The final result was a victory won by 
the French crown over the Gallican Church. 
In 1516 a decree was passed by the Lateran 
Council, which did away with certain exemp- 
tions and prerogatives hitherto claimed for 
the Ejng of France, and known as the Prag- 
matic Sanction. But a Concordat was en- 
tered into by the high contracting parties, 
the Crown and the Curia, which allowed the 
king most extensive liberties in dealing with 
ecclesiastical aflFairs; and he might henceforth 
nominate to all the bishoprics and abbeys in 



98 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

his realm. The Concordat granted a royal 
supremacy of which more was to be heard 
under Louis XIV.; but these consequences 
would not have prevented Leo from signing it. 
On March 16, 1517, the Fifth Lateran 
Council was dissolved. It had not been able 
to reform abuses, redress grievances, or unite 
the warring nations of Christendom against 
Islam. That same year, on All Hallows Eve, 
an Augustinian friar named Martin Luther 
fastened on the door of the Castle Church at 
Wittenberg in Saxony ninety-five theses, or 
propositions, on the subject of indulgences. 
The Reformation, which was specially de- 
signed to attack the traditional beliefs touch- 
ing the Communion of Saints, reckons this 
as its birthday. German grievances would 
avenge themselves on Rome by laying waste 
the German Church. It was time that Leo X. 
quitted the stage where he had been acting 
a somewhat frivolous part. He died of joy 
and fever at his country house of Magliana, 
on hearing that the French were driven from 
Milan (December 1, 1521). Six years later 
Rome fell into the hands of a Spanish and 
Lutheran host, which ended the triumphant 
days of Humanism. We must now draw 
nearer to that heart-shaking event, and 
describe how it came to pass. 



CHAPTER m 

FROM THE SACK OF ROME TO THE BEGINNINGS 
OF THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR (1527-1618. 
ST. IGNATIUS OF LOYOLA's " SPIRITUAL 

exercises") 

St. Peter's at Rome, so men beKeved dur- 
ing the IVIiddle Ages, was fomided by the first 
Christian Emperor, Constantine, and con- 
secrated by St. Silvester on November 18, 
326. The Popes dwelt in their Lateran house 
beside St. John's, which was their Cathedral; 
but St. Peter's lifted its majestic height over 
the tomb of the Prince of the Apostles. 
Spared by Alaric, Genseric, Totila, it ran 
some risk of destruction from the Lombards, 
who, under Luitprand, took away its sacred 
lamps in 738. Their sacrilegious attempt 
brought down Pepin and his Franks upon 
them, with such consequences as we have 
briefly told. In 800 Charlemagne's corona- 
tion began a long and most romantic series 
of these imperial rites, constantly dabbled in 
blood. Saracens from Kairouan plundered 
the Basilica in 846, which necessitated the 

99 



100 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

erection of walls about it by Leo IV., and 
gave rise to the Leonine City. In St. Peter's 
Charles the Bald was crowned Emperor by 
John VIII. (875). When Otho I. 'translated 
the Roman Empire to the Eastern Franks'' 
(962), he knelt inside the great doors and did 
homage to the fisherman of Galilee. There 
in 996 Otho III. received consecration from 
his youthful cousin, the saintly Gregory V. 
There was Henry VI., last of the Franconians, 
crowned by his prisoner and victim Paschal 
II. There, again, did Frederick Barbarossa 
in 1155 seize the Roman diadem, while his 
lanzknechts outside massacred a thousand 
of the Roman people. There his grandson, 
Frederick IL, was recognized as lord of the 
world by Honorius III. Another and a 
weaker prince of that name, but a Habsburg 
not a Hohenstauffen, Frederick III., ends 
the shining procession rather ignominiously, 
under Nicholas V., in 1452. Since that year 
no Emperor has been crowned in Rome or 
Constantinople. Sancta Sophia was degraded 
into a mosque; St. Peter's, which had 
fallen into decay while the Great Schism 
went on, was slightly restored by the care of 
Nicholas, but awaited demolition from the 
rude hands of Julius IL 



TO THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR 101 

Julius, designing himself a tomb (such is 
the vanity of mortals) gave the commission 
for it to Michael Angelo. The Florentine 
exceeded all former Papal monuments in his 
vast and beautiful drawings; but where 
was room to be found? His patron resolved 
to destroy the Basilica which over thirty 
generations of Catholics had visited, and 
he called in Bramante to do it — an architec- 
tural genius but enemy of all that was not 
classic in style. Bramante's conception of a 
Greek cross and lofty domes to replace the 
old St. Peter's has been praised by every 
succeeding judgment; so much of it as was 
carried out entitles the later Church to our 
warm admiration. But there was no need 
to shatter and tear down the venerable 
fabric, as JuKus II. tore it down in one single 
year, 1505. He Kttle saw how wide a gulf he 
was opening between the united Christendom 
of past ages and the centuries to come. 

The new St. Peter's became a field of battle, 
a sign that was at once spoken against. With- 
out gifts from the whole West it could never 
fulfil the Pope's colossal ambition. Those gifts 
were sought by the system of Indulgences, 
now elaborately adapted to bring in revenues 
of war and peace, which the Roman Chancery 



102 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

could employ as it listed. Theologians, like 
Cardinal Cajetan, were carefully explaining 
on what principles such donations might be 
asked and given. Their theory was unim- 
peachable; but the nations north of the 
Alps, and at their head Germany, murmured 
against a method of taxation which was li- 
able to every sort of abuse, which maintained 
in the Holy Place men so dissolute as the Re- 
naissance had fostered — ^boy-cardinals, non- 
resident bishops, secularized popes. Ques- 
tions of morals, finance, religion, national 
differences, were brought to a definite and 
dangerous burning-point by the Indulgences 
given to build St. Peter's. "When Indul- 
gences were extended, multiplied, and con- 
verted into money transactions,'' says Pastor, 
"it was obvious, taking into account the 
covetousness of the age, that the greatest 
abuses should prevail." 

But these were symptoms rather than 
causes of a change long foreseen by the wise, 
to which the Concihar movement, the cry 
for reformation in head and members, the 
"hundred grievances of the German nation," 
the Hussite revolts, the French Pragmatic 
Sanction, the English Acts of Parliament 
against Papal "provisions," and pecuniary 



TO THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR 103 

demands, had pointed the way. On viewing 
the whole field where squadrons now began 
to form, we perceive that the object of attack 
was Italian supremacy. If doctrine was called 
in question, yet the first line of assault 
did not throw itself against dogma but 
against Canon Law. *'By putting forward 
a decree of Clement VI.,'' says Lord Acton of 
Cajetan, "he drove Luther to declare that 
no Papal decree was a sufficient security for 
him.'' The campaign moved from abuse of 
such decrees to the authority of Popes, of 
Councils, of the whole hierarchical system. 
In 1517 Luther did not deny that Indulgences 
might be good in themselves; before three 
years had elapsed he burnt Leo X.'s Bull 
condemning him, and in 1525 his marriage 
declared monasticism to be unchristian, while 
his impetuous disciples had been foremost in 
taking away the Mass. Instead of Church 
tradition, Luther substituted "the Bible and 
the Bible only"; this gave him the principle 
of dogma. For grace conferred by the sacra- 
ments which a priest administered, he lighted 
upon the hitherto disregarded idea of imputa- 
tion by faith apprehending its Redeemer; this 
made ordinances superfluous or mere signs, 
and the priesthood fell into a subordinate 



104 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

rank, while the preacher dictated laws from 
his pulpit. 

By 1520 Luther's position was clear. It 
reversed Catholicism when it recognized that 
the individual Christian, united with his 
fellows, made the Church, and not the Church 
the Christian. Luther did not trouble about 
history; he knew nothing of art; his Latin 
studies had left him quite untouched by the 
liberal spirit which distinguished men of the 
Renaissance type. He was a Roman neither 
by taste nor temperament. We may find his 
ancestors in the "De Moribus Germanorum'* 
of Tacitus; and that is why he carried the 
nation with him. 

Under what scandalous conditions Leo X. 
revived the Petrine indulgence, despite his 
oath to the contrary, and shared its profits 
with Albert, Archbishop of Mayence, we 
may learn from historians. In 1517 the Ger- 
man Church was a confederacy of high-born 
prince-prelates, enormously rich, too often 
dissolute, and at best men of the world who 
left their spiritual charge to others. There 
was evidence of much piety in the middle and 
lower classes; but the clergy were impover- 
ished, the religious orders had fallen back 
after Cardinal Cusa s reform. These evils 



TO THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR 105 

were aggravated by the weakness of the 
Empire, sunk under Maximilian to its lowest 
ebb. At Rome, in a world of art and luxury, 
political intrigue was always rampant; but 
no court official studied the German problem 
or could have gained a gHmpse of what the 
Renaissance on that side of the Alps fore- 
boded. Tetzel, whom Luther's propositions 
assailed point-blank, was supported by his 
own order, the Dominicans. Accordingly, one 
Dominican, Prierias, "Master of the Sacred 
Palace," replied to Luther; and a second. 
Cardinal Cajetan, cross-examined him at 
Augsburg (October, 1518). Cajetan's pro- 
cedure involved the Holy See where Tetzel 
alone had been compromised. Miltitz, who 
came next, put the Dominican preacher aside 
and granted the fact of abuse. John Eck 
argued against Luther's appeal to a Coun- 
cil. He took the whole case to Rome, and 
he assisted in drafting the Bull, "Exurge 
Domine," by which forty-one Lutheran 
theses were condemned and their author was 
excommunicated (June 15, 1520). 

By this time, events had come to pass which 
determined the future of Germany and of 
Europe. In June, 1519, the Flemish or 
Spanish prince Charles had been elected 



106 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

Emperor, greatly to the disappointment of 
Leo; for the Pope judged, and history 
confirms his judgment, that Itahan inde- 
pendence would perish under Charles V. As 
much, if not more important, was the discov- 
ery Luther made that he could write and 
speak a German which would kindle his 
nation to mutiny. His tracts in 1520, "To 
the Christian Nobles,'' on "'The Babylonish 
Captivity of the Church," and on "The 
Freedom of a Christian Man,'' have been 
called "half -battles"; their language by 
sheer brute force thundered down opposition. 
Luther was the strong man armed, who felt 
that Germany would delight in his strokes 
against Rome. The Latin elegants who 
thronged about Leo could never grasp such 
weapons; in fighting this Teuton spirit they 
were dealing with the unknown. 

Charles V. had his personal views; to him 
the Lutheran trouble was a politician's re- 
source; he would use it in restraint of the 
Curia. Hence the Diet of Worms, Ihe defence 
permitted to an open heresiarch, and his safe 
retirement. Charles was ever orthodox; but 
no ruler could be more absolute. He outlawed 
Luther; he would never have given him up to 
a Roman Inquisition. During Luther's stay 



TO THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR 107 

at the Wartburg he translated the New Testa- 
ment. This was not for lack of German 
Bibles; there is abundant proof that Scripture 
was well known, preached and commented on 
long before Wittenberg saw the friar among 
its professors. He meant his New Testament 
to serve as an appeal and a standard. It 
became the type of High German literature; 
it was a rival to the Vulgate and hung out 
as the national flag of defiance. 

While Luther lay in hiding, Leo X. died. 
By an extraordinary turn the cardinals chose 
a Fleming to be Pope, as the German Electors 
had made one an Emperor. Adrian VT., 
Regent of Spain, was a noble but not attract- 
ive person, who tried by individual effort to 
reform Rome, and who acknowledged to the 
Diet of Nuremberg that these frightful evils 
had their origin at the Papal Court. But he 
understood so Kttle of the inward meaning 
of Luther as to remark that no novice in 
theology would have fallen into his errors. 
The expression has a double edge. Granting 
CathoKc principles and Catholic logic, Adrian 
was fully justified. But Erasmus might 
have repKed, "Holy Father, Luther anism is 
not a heresy; it is a religious revolution." 
For, as Lord Acton says, "There was no 



108 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

question at issue which had not been pro- 
nounced by him (Luther) insuflScient for 
separation, or which was not abandoned 
afterwards, or modified in a CathoKc sense 
by Melanchthon. That happened to every 
leading doctrine at Augsburg, at Ratisbon, 
or at Leipzig/' The Pope by himself could 
not work a reformation; but Adrian has the 
glory of tracing its design. When he died 
one thing was manifest, that the dreaded 
council would have to be convoked. Another, 
still more astonishing, was hidden from men's 
eyes, that where the Regent of Spain failed, 
though seated in the Papal Chair, a saint 
from the old Catholic land of Biscay would 
succeed. Adrian, a little before he laid his 
burden down, had given to Ignatius of Loyola 
in Rome the pilgrim's hcence to set out for 
Palestine. Ignatius entered Jerusalem on 
September 4, 1523. Ten days afterwards 
the last non-Italian Pope expired; reform 
was delayed until the founder of the Company 
of Jesus could take it in hand. At this time 
Luther was forty years old; Loyola was 
thirty-two. But their attitude towards one 
another is that of action and reaction; these 
eight years divide two generations. 
Julius dei Medici now, by dehberate effort. 



TO THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR 109 

made himself Pope, after a conclave which 
lasted fifty days. Cold, hesitating, timid, 
all Clement VII. desired was to continue the 
policy of the Borgia, but so that his own 
family should profit by it. He held Rome 
and dominated Florence. The Colonna were 
his deadly enemies, the Orsini his kinsfolk. 
He leagued himself with France for the sake 
of Milan in December, 1524. And on Feb- 
ruary 24, 1525, Francis I. lost the Battle of 
Pavia, lost his freedom, and fell into the 
hands of Charles V. In the negotiations 
that followed. Emperor, Pope and King were 
deceivers and deceived. Charles imposed 
on his captive at Madrid impossible condi- 
tions, making probably the chief political 
blunder of his life. Clement is reported to 
have said that it was an excellent Treaty if 
Francis did not observe it. And the French 
King gained his hberty at the expense of his 
honour. Whether the Pope released him 
from his oath is uncertain; that he never 
meant to keep it every one but Charles V. 
took for granted. Clement, however, was 
so ill-advised by Giberti as to conclude 
against the Emperor an aUiance with Francis 
once more. He offered Charles's general, 
Pescara, the crown of Naples as a bribe 



110 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

for desertion. Outrageous despatches on both 
sides brought matters to a crisis, and on June 
23, 1526, Clement plunged into the last war 
undertaken by a Pope on behalf of Italian 
independence. 

It is hard to condemn and difficult to 
excuse a policy as unfortunate as it was tor- 
tuous. The Pope did not see that he was 
tying the Emperor's hands, thereby assisting 
Luther and the Protestant revolt. But 
Charles, deeply exasperated, and as it were 
struck with madness, himself became the 
author of a series of events which have left on 
his memory an indelible stain. To his envoy, 
Moncada, he suggested that the Colonna, 
headed by their unspeakable Cardinal Pom- 
peo, should assail Clement in Rome. To the 
Lutherans he sent a message that they were 
wanted against the Turk, and they would 
know what Turk he meant. On September 
19, 1526, his first charge was executed. 
Spaniards and Colonnesi rode in through the 
Lateran Gate. Next morning Clement fled 
into St. Angelo; the Vatican was plundered, 
St. Peter's horribly desecrated, and the Pope's 
life threatened. Under compulsion he par- 
doned the Colonna, but in November out- 
lawed them and seized their strong places. 



TO THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR 111 

A doubtful truce carried him on to February, 
1527, when the Lutheran free captain, Frunds- 
berg, joined forces with Bourbon, a French 
traitor, and their undisciphned army began 
its expedition towards Rome. Frundsberg 
died at Ferrara in March. The Pope offered 
an armistice, sent a ransom, but could not 
hinder these miscreants, after they had found 
Florence on its guard, from pushing on to the 
Eternal City. They reached Isola Farnese 
on May 4, 1527. Clement had taken courage 
again, and would not treat with Bourbon. 
May 6 arrived, a misty morning, and the 
General ordered the assault. He was him- 
self killed immediately; the Prince of Orange 
(a name destined to be ominous in the wars 
of religion to Catholics) took the command. 
Again Clement crept into St. Angelo by sub- 
terranean ways; and before two in the 
afternoon Rome was captured. 

Thus a Medici Pope and a Catholic Em- 
peror delivered the Capital of Christendom 
into Lutheran hands, six years after Charles 
had put Luther to the ban. For eight days 
the sack of Rome continued. Murder, lust, 
sacrilege, avarice, held high festival; and 
Spaniards outdid Germans in riot and pil- 
lage. The people fled; cardinals and clergy 



112 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

were tortured to disclose their treasures; 
the beautiful things which had been created 
by the Renaissance underwent violent hand- 
ling or were destroyed. Nine months passed 
before the lawless soldiery quitted their prey. 
Florence expelled the Medici; Clement was 
a prisoner. He escaped on December 6, 
1527, to Orvieto, despoiled of all his pos- 
sessions, and with him the joyous days of a 
paganized Humanism fled from Rome. By 
the Treaty of Cambray Francis I. yielded to 
the Spaniard his claims on Italy (August 3, 
1529). The Pope forgave Charles, and 
crowned him at Bologna, February 24, 1530, 
anniversary of the Battle of Pavia and 
the Emperor's birthday. Florence, which 
had gallantly struggled for freedom, with 
Michael Angelo among its defenders, capitu- 
lated on August 12 of the same year. Italy 
was now to become a geographical expres- 
sion. Venice cowered behind its lagoons. 
The Reformers strode on to the League of 
Schmalkald, where princes led and preachers 
followed. Clement was willing to call a 
Council, to make unheard-of concessions, or 
so he professed. Charles in 1532 granted 
large toleration to Protestants at Nuremberg. 
When this ill-starred pontiff died, September 



TO THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR 113 

25, 1534, England, Denmark, Sweden, part 
of Switzerland, one half of Germany, were in 
revolt. To the interests of his family, to 
the possession of Florence or Milan, he had 
sacrificed the Church. 

England was lost by Clement; but the 
honour of religion was tardily saved. After 
LoUardy sank into discredit, no heresies 
troubled the nation. Henry VIII., as every 
coin of the realm bears witness, wrote against 
Luther, and in return was named Defender 
of the Faith by Pope Leo. Wolsey made 
himself Papal Vicar when Clement lay cap- 
tive in St. Angelo. Then the King's "case 
of conscience" and "great matter" was put 
before him at Orvieto. He seemed willing 
to go to any length in concession, if we may 
believe the English envoys. But the Holy 
See must be judged by its formal acts, and 
during six years the Pope fenced, but did 
nothing beyond permitting his legates, Wolsey 
and Campeggio, to open their court in Eng- 
land. Queen Katharine appealed to Rome. 
Henry got his divorce from Cranmer in May, 
1533, after marrying Anne Boleyn in January. 
Cranmer's action signified that the Ejng, 
and not the Pope, had supreme spiritual 
jurisdiction, or as men said in mediaeval 



114 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

language, ^'the whole power of the keys." 
Convocation had been coerced into declaring 
him head of the Church. Parliament by 
various measures gave him fresh prerogatives 
consequent on his new title. Rome must 
move at last. The tribunal of the Rota 
declared Henry's marriage with Katharine 
valid; and Clement VIL, in secret consistory 
(March 24, 1534), confirmed that finding. 
He was answered by the Act of Royal Suprem- 
acy with its ''terrible powers,'' in November; 
and the connection of England with Papal 
Rome, which went back nine hundred years 
and more, was severed at a stroke. But 
Clement had passed away before the axe fell. 

Section H 

the catholic revival (1534-1616) 

That year, 1534, is commonly and rightly 
reckoned a turning-point in the history of 
the Vatican. Paul HI., elected October 13 
by an almost unanimous vote, marks in his 
own person the change from an unreformed 
Papacy to another and a higher type. As 
Cardinal Farnese, it was believed that he 
owed his elevation under Alexander VI. 
to his sister Giulia's dishonour. He had 



THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL 115 

children born out of wedlock, one of whom, 
when he was Pope, he made a prince at Parma 
and Piacenza — miserable little towTis, of 
which the names have ever proved disastrous 
to the Holy See. For his son's advantage he 
thwarted Charles V., now resolved on exter- 
minating Protestants by iron as well as by 
fire. But Paul HI. likewise opened the 
Sacred College to reformers on the Catholic 
side — to Reginald Pole, Sadoleto, Contarini; 
and to Erasmus, who declined the purple and 
died at Basle in 1536. A new company was 
entering on the scene. By the momentous 
Bull, "Regimini Militantis Ecclesise," in 
1540, the Company of Jesus had its approval 
from Paul IIL, who exclaimed after reading 
a draft of its constitution, "The Finger of 
God is here." In 1542 the Universal Inquisi- 
tion was set up in Rome, under the Pope's 
immediate presidency. His reforming car- 
dinals were urging him to comply with the 
Emperor's insistent demands by convoking 
a General Council. After various attempts, 
and not very willingly, at last he appointed 
its meeting at Trent, in the Tirol, for March, 
1545. 

So, on these different lines, the influence 
of Spain was shaping war and controversy and 



116 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

legislation into a crusade against Protestants, 
wherever found. It is obvious that the 
motives which stirred Englishmen and Teu- 
tons to cast off their allegiance to Rome, did 
not for the most part exist south of the Alps 
and the Pyrenees. Moreover, as writers ob- 
serve who are by no means friendly to Cathol- 
icism, "a reform of the Spanish clergy, secular 
and regular, had taken place before Luther 
arose.'' Thanks to such earnest rulers as the 
Cardinals Mendoza and Ximenes, to saints 
like Thomas of Villanova, and to the action of 
bishops and synods, the moral condition of 
ecclesiastics in general *^was immeasurably 
superior to that of the clergy in any other part 
of Western Christendom." Learning, too, 
had revived. The University of Alcala was 
founded by Ximenes, and has given its name 
to the great Complutensian Polyglot, which 
he published from its presses. Spaniards now 
held the largest empire that had ever been 
known. They were masters of Germany and 
the Netherlands, of Italy north and south, of 
a vast and growing dominion in America. 
The resources of Pope and Emperor combined 
were immensely superior to those which could 
be mustered by small German princes and 
the multiplying sects of the Reformers. 



THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL 117 

England was pursuing its own eccentric 
course under Henry VIII., who never became 
a Lutheran. France had been defeated again 
and again by Charles V. But this new cru- 
sade was calling for a leader and a plan of 
campaign. Both were now furnished in the 
person of Ignatius of Loyola, and by means of 
the Company of Jesus which he created. 

One man had found the secret of combating 
evil within and without the CathoHc Com- 
munion. It is written in the "Spiritual 
Exercises/' of which a marvellous meditation 
on the "Two Standards/' — the standard of 
Christ and the standard of Satan — forms, as 
it were, the strategical centre. The effect 
was speedily apparent. 

"In a single generation,'' says Macaulay, 
"the whole spirit of the Church of Rome 
underwent a change." But that change 
was a reversion to Catholic principles, over- 
laid though not extinguished by the secular 
ambition of prelates, and the pagan luxury 
to which they yielded themselves. Ignatius 
could, therefore, as Lord Acton observes, 
undertake to reform the Church by the 
Papacy. Luther was for destroying the 
Papacy. Loyola built his plans on the very 
admission of all that it claimed. He com- 



118 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

pelled the Pope, we may say, to realize his own 
ideals; and Ignatius was canonized, whereas 
Savonarola had been burnt. His genius 
moved by the logic of an absolute sincerity. 
Given the Catholic faith, reason might apply 
it freely to every subject; but to save the 
Faith was the first step. 

"'The history of the Order of Jesus is the 
history of the great Catholic reaction.'' Loy- 
ola, to give him his conventional name, 
created the associations of romance, self- 
sacrifice, discipline, learning, and infinite 
courage, that set a man against a man — him- 
self becoming the protagonist of Luther — • 
until then unaccountably wanting in Catholi- 
cism under the Renaissance. Yet the world 
had been impressed already by the stupen- 
dous greatness of Michael Angelo; by the 
imperturbable heroism, smiling on death, 
of Sir Thomas More; it was Rome that 
appalled and saddened the faithful. Now 
Rome had its heroes, its resident saints. 
Contarini was an apparition of light; Pole, 
a gracious and gentle St. John, opposing 
his meekness to Henry VIIL's tyranny; 
the stern Caraffa showed, at least, a fanati- 
cism which must be admired. And it was no 
small thing that even the shifty, worldly- 



THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL 119 

minded Clement VII. had let the Kingdom 
of England go, rather than violate the 
sanctity of the marriage-contract. This 
was the more significant that, left to him- 
self, the Medici would have bartered all laws, 
divine and human, for revenge on Charles 
v., whose kinswoman he was protecting in 
Christ's Name. 

New organs of combat and acquisition, 
in a life and death struggle, were needed, 
unless Italy, invaded by German heresies 
after German legions, and France, which had 
lately produced Calvin, were to be wrested 
from the Popedom, seemingly on the edge of 
dissolution. The old Orders had been cast 
into the fire of adversity, and came out a 
heap of ashes. Calumny has fastened on 
them charges not proven or much exagger- 
ated. It is undeniable, however, that the 
leading men of the Reformation were many 
of them bred in the cloister; that riches and 
ease had relaxed the fibres of discipline; that 
neither Cusa, nor Capistrano, nor Traversari, 
nor Pius IL, nor iEgidius Viterbo in the 
Lateran Council, did more than touch the 
fringe of inveterate abuses. The commission 
appointed by Paul III. went so far as to 
recommend that existing Orders and Com- 



120 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

munities should take no fresh novices; an 
entirely new generation must begin the 
better time. The Cardinal of Lucca, Guidic- 
cioni, would reduce them to four, and these 
of strict observance. In 1528, the Ca- 
puchins had restored the early Francis- 
can model; but when Ochino, their superior,, 
fell away to Protestantism, they ran no 
slight risk of suppression. Other less im- 
portant attempts were made by the Bar- 
nabites and Theatines. It was Caraffa, 
the Neapolitan, of this last foundation, 
who noted Ignatius with his companions 
at Venice and bade him go to Rome, where 
the Crusade against the new Mohammedans 
called him. 

Ignatius obeyed, and, in spite of oppo- 
sition, persuaded Contarini, Guidiccioni, and 
Paul III. himself, that the Company of Jesus 
ought to be allowed to exist. The name gave 
offence. The freedom from monastic usages 
provoked remonstrance. Ignatius, a soldier 
who had undergone conversion from worldly 
aims to follow his Captain Christ, had been 
imprisoned by the Spanish Inquisition; he 
had composed at Manresa while yet a lay- 
man his "'Spiritual Exercises"; he had 
travelled over Europe, lived as a poor student 



THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL 121 

in Paris, and trained half a dozen men 
(including Francis Xavier) to be heroes in 
the CathoHc War. He required from his 
comrades mihtary obedience. They pledged 
themselves to go wherever they might be 
sent by the Holy See. On April 7, 1541, 
Ignatius was elected general for life. On 
the same day Xavier set sail from Portugal 
for the East Indies. 

Absolute government and religious freedom 
are ideas not easy to reconcile. The six- 
teenth century was struggling with both of 
them — a Rebecca who was to bring forth 
Jacob and Esau, enemies from their birth. 
Luther's Christian State, Henry of England's 
Royal Supremacy, Calvin's "Institutes," the 
*' Spiritual Exercises" of St. Ignatius, the 
Augsburg Confession, the decrees of Trent, 
the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Westminster 
Catechisms, are all framed on the principle 
of submission to the powers that be. Volun- 
tary association, if at all dreamt of, is in- 
stantly set aside. Heresy was treason, and 
treason was heresy. None (except a small 
detested minority, afterwards Socinian) 
complained of rulers because they persecuted 
dissent. The question turned not on freedom, 
but on truth. Rome, indeed, whose tribunals 



122 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

judged heretics, assimilated baptism to the 
oath of allegiance and held that Protestants 
were rebels. Over the unbaptized Rome 
did not pretend to exercise jurisdiction. 
But Protestant rulers — how were they to 
behave towards their Catholic subjects — 
and their subjects towards them.^^ By 
Canon Law (especially the Fourth Council of 
Lateran, 1215), a Christian prince lapsing 
into heresy forfeited his sovereign rights. He 
was excommunicated by the very fact; and 
it was the Pope's duty, unless repentance 
followed, to depose him. Paul III. in 1535 
drew up, and did his best to publish, his 
Bull of deposition against Henry VIII., 
according to mediaeval precedent and in 
the strong language of the Roman Chancery. 
If execution did not take place, the reason 
was that Charles V. had other burdens on 
his shoulders, not that he questioned the 
Papal prerogatives. For Canon Law was 
the law of Christendom. 

Catholics, it has been said on their behalf, 
condemned ''aggressive" intolerance, while 
defending by the sword society against 
anarchists, the moral order against immor- 
alists, the faith against apostates. But 
Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin, Knox, ap- 



THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL 123 

proved of rooting out idolatry and error 
by the "civil magistrate." Melanchthon 
has recorded his theory in a sentence, ''Non 
enim plectitur fides sed haeresis" — the judge 
chastises heresy, not faith. For example, 
the Catholic Mass implied false doctrine 
and was the practice of idolatry, therefore 
governments must put it down. Melanch- 
thon, again, contended that "obstinate" 
Anabaptists should be done to death; and 
Beza would have the same penalty inflicted 
on Anti-Trinitarians. He was defending 
the course taken with Servetus, betrayed, 
arrested, condemned, and executed (October 
27, 1553), under Calvin's direction. Calvin 
himself published next year, "A Defence 
of the Orthodox Faith, showing that heretics 
ought to be punished by the sword." All 
the early Reformers taught passive obedience 
to governors, however tyrannical; but the 
ruler must take his doctrine from the clergy. 
Charles V. naturally proceeded to act on 
this principle, only that he preferred the old 
clergy to the new. But he still hoped for 
a reconciliation, and the "Interim" of June, 
1544, tolerated the confession of Augsburg, 
until the Church by its oecumenical judgment 
should decide the points at issue. The 
Council of Trent opened with a few prelates 



124 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

at the appointed time, too late for an agree- 
ment with men who were hardened against 
Rome by twenty-five years of controversy. 
In 1547 the Emperor, commanding ItaHan 
and Papal troops, won the great victory of 
Miihlberg over the Lutherans. It decided 
nothing. At Passau, and then at Augsburg 
in 1555, a regular peace was concluded 
by which these same Lutherans gained 
toleration for themselves, but other sectaries 
were left without recognition. No man, 
however, was henceforth to suffer death on 
account of his nonconformity; but dissenters 
might be expelled. This was the principle 
*'Cujus regio, ejus religio," the creed followed 
the prince. By another clause, of '^ecclesi- 
astical reservation," if a Catholic prelate 
fell away he thereby lost his ''spiritual" 
dominions. In virtue of this exception, 
territories extending from Austria to the 
Rhine and as far down as Holland were 
preserved "under the crozier." But to the 
apprehension of Charles V. the Peace of 
Augsburg took from the Holy Roman Empire 
its sacred character and its meaning. His 
long day was going down in defeat. "He 
had neither reconciled the Protestants nor 
reformed the Church." Under somewhat 
affecting circumstances he laid down his 



THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL 125 

dignities one by one, and expired at the con- 
vent of St. Juste, September 21, 1558. His 
son, Philip, inherited the Spanish legacy and 
the Cathohc interest, which he upheld or 
exploited during the next forty years. 

Francis L, who died in 1547, fulfilled that 
saying, "Unstable as water, thou shalt not 
excel." He wavered from side to side, 
although the French policy was always now, 
in eflFect, anti-Roman. It demanded a servile 
Papacy, of which Avignon afforded the 
type; a Gallican Church whose ''liberties" 
should be interpreted by the Crown law- 
yers; and a balance of power to check the 
Austrian-Spanish pretensions. To drive the 
wedge of Lombardy between Vienna and 
Madrid was the object of those repeated 
Italian campaigns. Had France embraced the 
Reformation, it might have attained in this 
reign to a success that did not come until 
Richelieu had frankly allied himself with 
German and Swedish Protestants. But 
Luther's intense Germanism, which swept 
away Roman opposition in the Fatherland, 
could not charm the delicate French tempera- 
ment; to chivalry, as Francis I. still conceived 
of it, a Saxon peasant's language and manners 
were revolting. But neither would the King 
of France, who had already sent Protestants 



126 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

to the stake, be persuaded by Master John 
Calvin to break with Rome. 

Calvin (1509-1564), a scion of the middle 
class, wrote his "Institutes'' before he was 
six-and-twenty, addressing the Crown on 
behalf of loyal yet persecuted "Reformed'' 
Christians. This volume, the "Social Con- 
tract" of the century, became to all the 
Churches that went beyond Luther but did 
not advance so far as Socinus, an inspired 
comment on the Bible. It brought back 
the idea, which Luther discarded, of a Church 
with coercive powers; "new presbyter is 
but old priest writ large," said Milton, and 
history echoes him. Yet there was a differ- 
ence. The Papal authority, existing along- 
side of feudalism, and displayed in courtly 
forms, had lost its earlier popular aspect. 
The Reformation, though used by kings and 
nobles for their own purposes, was chiefly 
a middle-class movement. In all countries 
it took hold of the industrial centres; it 
flourished in the towns. We may say that 
it disdained ritual, rejected chivalry, and 
tended to overthrow government, even while 
its preachers talked of passive obedience. 
The Calvinist, above all men, was not passive, 
and was not obedient, except to his clergy, 
who directed all affairs, public and private. 



THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL 127 

France by her Huguenots, Scotland by her 
Presbyterians, the Netherlands by their 
*'Gueux," England by her Puritans, gave 
proof that in the teaching of Calvin there was 
danger to royalty; at all events, so thought 
anointed persons who had to deal with its 
uprisings. Luther was a mystic, not a con- 
structive politician. Calvin was a lawgiver, 
a Lycurgus at Geneva; his Christian Com- 
monwealth did not grant much power to kings 
in the long run, as Rousseau demonstrated. 
Geneva, the Rome and Sparta of the North, 
reckoned these two men, who were alike in 
principle absolute, among her citizens. Let 
us mark the word "citizen" which in political 
science was to replace the word "subject." 
At once Protestant and revolutionary, it tells 
us why no French king could become a 
Huguenot, and why Henry of Navarre sac- 
rificed his creed to his crown. 

When Charles V. abdicated, he made over 
his hereditary dominions to Philip IL, at that 
time King of England. Philip's appearance 
in the EngKsh statute-book, like Charles's 
capture of Rome, constitutes an era. The 
Sack of 1527 finished, as no other event could, 
a Renaissance that dishonoured religion. 
The fires of Smithfield gave Elizabeth her 
sovereign power, which no arbitrary con- 



128 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

duct of ministers and no conspiracies, at home 
or abroad, could weaken. Spain and England, 
warily diplomatizing with each other until 
the Armada was ready, held the future 
between them in a doubtful balance. The 
Spanish Empire, extending from Sicily to 
Mexico, secure while France was torn by the 
Guises, the Condes, the Colignys, had one 
vulnerable spot — the Netherlands, where, 
thanks to Philip and his lieutenant Alva, 
reform broke out into revolution. The United 
States of Holland were baptized in blood. 
Elizabeth also, intent on making Ireland 
Protestant by confiscation, by laying Mun- 
ster waste, by hunting the "'mere Irish '* 
down to starve and die, entered on the 
remarkable experiment which has bound the 
Island of St. Patrick more closely than ever 
to Rome, and sent forth its exiles as pioneers 
of Catholicism in three Continents. These 
results were certain by the end of the 
sixteenth century. What of Austria and 
the German Empire.^ Would Central Europe 
return to its Roman allegiance, or become 
altogether Protestant? That question was 
answered by the Thirty Years' War and the 
Peace of Westphalia. 

''Unreformed and disorganized," the gov- 
ernment of which Paul III. was the last 



THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL 129 

representative had been shattered as by an 
earthquake. But the Catholic Church re- 
mained. Gathering her resources, first in the 
Jesuit Order, then in the Council of Trent, 
and putting them into the hands of a reno- 
vated Papacy, she went forward in the New 
and the Old World undauntedly. The Coun- 
cil, divided into three periods (1545-47; 
1551-52; 1562-64), ''showed the Church as 
a living institution, capable of work and 
achievement; it strengthened the confidence 
both of her members and herself; and it was 
a powerful factor in heightening her efficiency 
as a competitor with Protestantism, and in 
restoring and reinforcing her imperilled 
unity." Such is the judgment of a modern 
historian, not a Catholic. Trent undid the 
effects of Constance and Basle by its entire 
submission to guidance from the Vatican. Its 
theological decisions were shaped in large 
measure by the Jesuits Laynez and Salmeron. 
Though scantily attended, the Council ex- 
pressed so unmistakably the voice of tradition 
that no genuine disciple of the Reformers 
could accept it, and all true adherents of the 
Papacy gave it a hearty welcome.. France, 
indeed, and even Spain, faithful to their royal 
despotism, would not suffer its decrees to 
modify the civil legislation. Philip II. was 



130 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

tenacious of his quasi-spiritual rights; France 
of her GaUican Hberties. The German Empire 
formally did not recognize the Council. It is 
among the fatalities of this and succeeding 
times, that so-called Catholic powers checked 
the victory of their own faith, lest the 
mediaeval theocracy should be restored. 

But no restoration came of the system 
which Gregory VII. had affirmed as a theory 
and sealed by Henry IV. 's submission at 
Canossa. Paul III. could not wrest the 
English sceptre from Henry Tudor. When 
Caraffa became Paul IV. (1555-59) his Nea- 
politan aversion to the Spaniards, and his 
headstrong temper, led him to declare war 
against Philip II., whom he threatened with 
forfeiture of all his crowns. Once more a 
Spanish army came up towards Rome, under 
the Duke of Alva, who, like a second Moncada, 
extorted peace at the point of the sword. 
When we reflect on Alva's later fame in the^ 
Low Countries, on Paul's defenceless position, 
and on Philip's place in history as champion 
of Papal claims, a more amazing comedy of 
cross-purposes can hardly be imagined. Paul 
IV. was a vigorous reformer, yet he gave the 
sacred purple to nephews who, for manifest 
crimes, were put to death by his successor. 
Mary Tudor and Cardinal Pole had brought 



THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL 131 

England back to the Roman Communion. 
This, surely not clear-eyed, Pontiff expended 
on Mary some of the thunder with which he 
meant to strike her husband, suspended Pole 
from the legatine dignity, and thought of 
proceeding still further when queen and 
cardinal died. In 1566 the Cardinal of 
Alessandria, who had presided over the In- 
quisition with great energy, was elected, and 
under the name of St. Pius V., holds a place 
in the Church's calendar. By this time, relig- 
ion, diplomacy, war, and tyrannicide were 
occupying one stage and exchanging parts in 
a world-wide confusion. St. Pius V., by the 
solemn act "Regnans in excelsis," declared 
Queen Elizabeth fallen from her royal estate, 
and bade her subjects give up their allegiance. 
These were measures which had no prospect 
of success; on the contrary, as Urban VIII. 
afterwards took note, they bore most heavily 
on English Catholics, charged with treason, 
and from that day liable to its atrocious 
penalties. Bulls of deposition belonged to an 
irrecoverable past. 

In Gregory XIII. 's reign occurred the 
massacre of St. Bartholomew (1572), devised 
by the French Court, and still to be seen 
depicted, though without its historical inscrip- 
tion, on the walls of the Vatican sala regia. 



132 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

We need not stir the embers of that fire. 
Catherine dei Medici let Queen Ehzabeth 
know that she might do with her CathoUc 
subjects even as Charles IX. had done with 
his Huguenots, "'cujus regio, ejus religio," — 
a truly Medicean philosophy. The Catholic 
League, the War in the Netherlands, the 
Spanish Armada, had religion for a pretext, to 
some extent for a motive. But the Popes were 
beginning to establish a balance of European 
powers instead of the mediaeval suzerainty 
snatched from their grasp. Sixtus V. (1585- 
1590), a strong ruler, magnificent in his plans, 
the founder of a new system of government in 
the Curia, and of the Rome which lasted in 
its main lines down to 1870, excommunicated 
Henry of Navarre, and joined the League. 
But Sixtus could not overcome Henry. It 
was the unmistakable feeling of the French 
nation which compelled the Bearnais to quit 
his Calvinism; and Clement VIIL, who 
absolved him, desired to make France a 
counterpoise to the Spanish monarchy. This 
was the long duel that created alliances and 
wars until an effective solution was reached 
in the Treaties of 1648, when the old-world 
system passed finally away. But thirty years 
of battle and of German anarchy went before 
the triumph of France. 



CHAPTER IV 

FROM THE ESCORIAL TO VERSAILLES (1563- 
1715. CERVANTES, ''dON QUIXOTE ''; 

BOSSUET, '* FUNERAL ORATIONS ") 

Philip II., a man of mediocre ability, un- 
pleasing character, and conscientious attend- 
ance to duty, ruled his empire from his 
desk, in the granite palace of the Escorial, 
by slow unscrupulous methods, not without 
some degree of success. That empire, which 
he held during all but five years of Elizabeth's 
reign (in fact from 1556 to 1598) was bound 
together only by religion; and for a time it 
seemed that Philip's dominions would be 
coextensive with the Roman Church. 'From 
1580 he was master of Portugal and all its 
colonies. He exploited, and his missionaries 
converted, the American Indies, from which 
the Silver Fleet brought infinite and fatal 
wealth to be hoarded in his treasury. Spain 
was governed on the lines of High Protection 
— the Faith was to be defended, especially 
against Luther (whose name comprised all 

133 



134 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES ^ 

heretics); and the world's bullion was to be 
held as a reserve in Castilian coffers. To 
purge the realm, all non-converted Jews 
had been expelled in 1492 by Ferdinand 
and Isabella. The rigorous Inquisition, a 
political no less than ecclesiastical engine of 
government, kept watch over the Maranos, 
or "New Christians,^' whose Hebrew descent 
was more certain than their belief in the creed 
of the Church.) These unhappy thousands 
suffered at home, or fled abroad — to Italy 
first, and then to liberated Holland. In 
1567 the Moriscoes, equally suspected and 
exasperated, rose in revolt; they were over- 
come, to be expelled in 1610 by Philip HI. 
It is not now imagined that Spanish com- 
merce or credit were immediately affected by 
driving out the Jews. 

Until France recovered from its long 
agony, the Empire of Castile was safe, in- 
comparably rich, valiant, and adventurous. 
As Giberti had warned Clement VII., the 
Pope was become a Spanish chaplain, seated 
at Rome between Philip's viceroys of Naples 
and Milan. The victorious Company of Jesus 
could not fail to strengthen a power which had 
protected them almost from the beginning. 
English Catholic exiles, Father Parsons at 



ESCORIAL TO VERSAILLES 135 

their head, were usually ^'hispaniolated,'' 
although a few in Flanders, of whom Paget 
was the spokesman, remained loyal, despite 
their sufferings. The earlier bonds of patriot- 
ism had melted in the furnace of religious 
heats, and the Leaguers in France, Cardinal 
Allen in Rome, were willing to yield the 
crowns of their respective countries to his 
Catholic Majesty. The impending war with 
Spain had provoked Coligny's murder and the 
massacre of St. Bartholomew — an event, said 
Lord Clarendon, which all pious Catholics 
at the time abominated. In 1585, when the 
League was formed, Philip stood at the zenith 
of his power; he meant that his daughter, 
Isabel, should be Queen of France; and on 
the Armada's triumph he was to be himself 
King of England. Had Farnese, Prince of 
Parma, succeeded in bringing his army 
across the Channel, that usurpation might 
easily have been effected. For the Spanish- 
Italian soldiers were the best in Europe. But 
the Armada was wrecked; Jacques Clement, 
a crazy Dominican friar, stabbed Henry III.; 
and the House of Bourbon commenced the 
final stage of French monarchy. 

In 1592 Farnese, the great-grandson of Paul 
in., and famous champion of the League, 



136 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

died. Under Henry IV. the French, returning 
to their old ways, became Royalist and 
Gallican once more. England, delivered from 
fear of Spanish invasions, nursing its Puritan 
youth for the most revolutionary movement 
in modern history, bided its time. The 
Low Countries, which in 1566 had risen only 
to be defeated, in 1572 revolted again, and 
in 1579 the United States of Holland became 
a Republic. They found a leader in William 
the Silent, Prince of Orange. He was killed 
in 1584 by an "obscure fanatic" named 
Gerard, who acted upon the doctrine of 
assassination which divines allowed and 
statesmen practised. Coligny, Burghley, 
William the Silent himself. Queen Elizabeth, 
and other chiefs of parties or rulers of States, 
entered into murder-plots. Mariana, the 
Spanish Jesuit, defended tyrannicide and 
Jacques Clement in a notorious book, after- 
wards condemned by the superiors of the 
Society; but his views were generally ad- 
mitted, and the contrivers of the Powder 
Plot (whoever these happened to be) knew 
that it was so. 

The triple alliance of France, England, 
and the United Provinces in 1596 denoted 
two conclusions of far-reaching importance. 



ESCORIAL TO VERSAILLES 137 

Holland was, though grudgingly, recognized 
as a sovereign power which would hold the 
commerce of the seas until Cromwell's Navi- 
gation Act gave it to Great Britain; and the 
French government, professing itself Catholic, 
was taking up an attitude towards Spain and 
Austria such as to make universal Catholic 
restoration impossible. The dying Philip gave 
what was left of the Netherlands to his 
daughter and her husband, the "Archdukes/*} 
A truce of twelve years, thanks to Henry IV., 
divided Belgium from the Dutch Republic, 
and Henry, preparing to invade Germany, fell 
under the poignard of Ravaillac in 1610. 
The mission of this Bourbon prince, always 
half a Protestant, was to be taken up by 
RicheHeu, the Cardinal-Duke, orthodox and 
intolerant at home, a Calvinist in his policy 
on the Meuse and the Rhine, who must be 
held to have sacrificed his own religion in 
order that France might seize the paramount 
powder, slipping now from the feeble hands 
of Spain. 

The Thirty Years' War, at which we have 
arrived, is not unfairly summed up as the 
last of the Crusades, or wars on behalf of 
Catholicism. It was a desperate struggle to 
revive the Holy Roman Empire, which 



138 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

could not be done without opposing the 
extension of privileges, already acquired by 
Lutherans, to their Calvinist rivals. Had 
these latter been worsted, the Confession of 
Augsburg would have lost its legal status 
also. Bohemia naturally offered the ground 
of battle. There, after 1390, the Wycliffite 
movement had assumed a significance for 
Central Europe, and had sown the seed from 
which Luther reaped a hundredfold. Its 
King, George Podiebrad (1458-1471), fought 
dexterously against Roman influences, leaving 
the country prepared to welcome any change 
that would enable it to cast off the Pope's 
authority. Lutherans abounded in Bohemia; 
for under Maximilian II. Austria had the least 
intolerant of governments. Hungary, too, 
was largely Protestant, while the Emperor 
brought in "a conciliatory, neutral, uncon- 
ventional Catholicism," the scorn of earnest 
believers, whether orthodox or reformed. 
Poland, by reason of a similar policy, was fast 
becoming the Promised Land of Socinians. 

But all this while the Catholic Revival was 
advancing along the German rivers, ever since 
the Jesuits had daringly established them- 
selves in Ingolstadt under the Duke of Ba- 
varia (1544). Learning, zeal, and political 



ESCORIAL TO VERSAILLES 139 

influence, including that of Charles V., were 
at their disposal. St. Peter Canisius, their 
young and brilliant German disciple, per- 
suaded Charles to depose Archbishop von 
Wied of Cologne; it was a warning to every 
prelate in the Fatherland that reform could 
no longer be put off. Canisius, preaching and 
teaching, did a marvellous work among his 
fellow-countrymen. He was ably seconded by 
the third General, who astonished Rome by 
the spectacle of a Borgia, Duke of Gandia, 
great-grandson of Alexander VI., as remark- 
able for every Catholic virtue as his Papal 
ancestor had been for the opposite. 

St. Francis Borgia founded the Roman 
College, or central university, as it proved, 
of the Society; he enlarged the German 
College, due to St. Ignatius, where priests 
of that nation might be trained in strict 
discipline and devotion to the Holy See. 
Rome was the meeting-place of saints as it 
had formerly been of poets and men of letters. 
The Vatican put on the air of a monastery. 
Ignatius, Charles Borromeo, Cardinal Ghis- 
lieri, afterwards Pius V., Philip Neri, and 
many others who have been canonized, were 
fellow-citizens or contemporaries in this new 
age, fertile beyond description in a type of 



140 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

exalted and passionate sanctity that drew 
back from no self-sacrifice on behalf of the 
Creed of Trent. The Jesuits excelled by vir- 
tue of their military yet flexible system, and 
displayed personal enthusiasm which the 
"Exercises '' enlightened, while obedience gave 
it a definite scope. They were taught to dis- 
like Erasmus; but in their schools the Eras- 
mian ideas of education prevailed, and a 
graceful literary style, a rhetoric persuasive 
though tending to be florid, announced that 
these Clerks Regular were genuine heirs of 
the Renaissance. Like Francis Bacon, who 
praised their methods of teaching unreserv- 
edly, they took all knowledge for their prov- 
ince. Soon they could reckon names of emi- 
nence in every department of research and 
discovery. Their divines, Laynez, Suarez, and 
in the next generation the French patristic 
scholar, Petavius, made a distinct advance on 
the older theological methods. Their most 
original writer was the Spaniard Molina, who 
refuted Calvin and by anticipation Jansenius. 
Rome, it has been said, was now ''serious 
and repentant,'' notwithstanding some great 
tragedies of crime. By the side of the German 
College similar institutions sprang up. The 
Canon Law was revised, the Vulgate Bible 



ESCORIAL TO VERSAILLES 141 

edited under Sixtus V. and Clement VIII. 
The Jesuit Cardinal Bellarmine shaped the 
controversy with Reformers into the position 
which it kept afterwards until Joseph de 
Maistre gave it an entirely new basis. Car- 
dinal Baronius, the Oratorian, published in 
eleven folios a history of the Church that 
for largeness of design and patience of learn- 
ing has never been surpassed. But while 
Rome was concentrating her forces, "the first 
explosion of private judgment/' says Lecky, 
"had shivered Protestantism into countless 
sects." In this hurly-burly, which was fast 
becoming a civil war, the Lutherans lost, 
the Calvinists gained, but the common cause 
suffered. It would be the task of genius to 
better Macaulay's description of this wonder- 
ful change in the tide of human affairs by 
which the Popes, driven back to their Roman 
ramparts, advanced with freshly-recruited 
legions a hundred years later almost to 
the shores of the Baltic. "At first," writes 
Macaulay, "the chances seemed to be de- 
cidedly in favour of Protestantism; but the 
victory remained with the Church of Rome. 
On every point she was successful. If we 
leap over another half-century (from about 
1580 to 1630) we find her victorious and 



142 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

dominant in France, Belgium, Bavaria, Bo- 
hemia, Austria, Poland, and Hungary. Nor 
has Protestantism, in the course of two 
hundred years, been able to recover any part 
of what was then lost/' 

Much had been done for the Catholic 
cause in Styria and Carinthia by the Arch- 
duke Ferdinand, who, in 1617, became King 
of Bohemia and Emperor-elect. In this 
larger world he followed up the same policy. 
He did not shrink from acts of repression, 
justified as he held by violations of law on the 
part of his Protestant subjects, which led to 
revolt and his attempted deposition by them. 
They offered the crown to Frederick V., 
elector palatine, son-in-law of James I., and 
thus ancestor of the Hanoverian Stuarts, our 
present reigning family. Frederick came to 
Prague, and the most desolating of modern 
wars began (1618-1648). In this wild en- 
counter it is hard to disentangle secular 
from religious motives. The Pope of the day. 
Urban VIII. (1623-1644), faintly shadowed 
forth in his learning, ostentation, nepotism, 
and ambitious aims, the fiercer memories 
left him by the Renaissance./ Urbino fell 
by reversion to the Holy See in 1631. But 
Urban's own war of Castro for the duchy of 



ESCORIAL TO VERSAILLES 143 

Parma was humiliating and unsuccessful. 
He leaned on France; distrusted and offended 
the Emperor Ferdinand; won for himself 
a bad name from uncompromising Catholics; 
and died without having contributed decisive 
help to his own cause in Germany. 

Richelieu came on the scene at the States- 
General of 1614, where he represented the 
clergy of Poitou. This assembly, the last 
of its kind until 1789, was Catholic in its 
sympathies, while asserting the King's divine 
right in opposition to Paul V. But Riche- 
lieu's lease of absolute power, unbroken 
henceforward, began in 1624. The Cardinal- 
minister finished with his Huguenots at La 
Rochelle (1628) but did not revoke the Edict 
of Nantes. The Dutch fleet helped this 
Catholic prelate to conquer their co-religion- 
ists; and he in turn protected Holland 
against the united forces of Spain and the 
Empire. He could not, however, prevent 
the victorious onset of Tilly, an orthodox 
general, devoted to the Jesuits, who for 
ten years carried all before him. Frederick, 
the "Winter King," lost Prague; Max of 
Bavaria became Catholic elector instead 
of the fugitive and deposed Lutheran; the 
"League" was triumphant. Wallenstein, a 



144 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

convert, also a Jesuit pupil, created the 
Austrian army, by way of enabling Ferdi- 
nand to balance his own allies, now be- 
come too hard for him. The League was, 
indeed, a religious confederation, but its 
members did not want the Emperor to be 
strong. 

Wallenstein, whom for an instant we may 
compare with Richelieu, would have made 
the Habsburg master of all German princes, 
as the Cardinal in France was breaking the 
noblesse. But the Emperor did not second 
Wallenstein. He pubHshed in March, 1629, 
the Edict of Restitution and dismissed the 
lieutenant who had overcome his opponents 
gloriously, but who would not execute these 
orders. By the Edict, all Church lands in 
the possession of Protestants since the 
arrangement at Passau (1552) were to be 
given back. Lutherans and Calvinists joined 
forces. Richelieu had perhaps contrived the 
dismissal of Wallenstein; now he called to 
the Swedish King, Gustavus Adolphus, and 
sent him into Germany as the Protestant 
champion (1630). Gustavus, no doubt, pro- 
posed to defend his religious brethren; but 
the reward was to be Sweden's leadership 
of Reformed Europe. His star ascended 



ESCORIAL TO VERSAILLES 145 

high in the heavens. Tilly won Magdeburg, 
which lying rumour accused him of burning; 
but the King defeated the Catholic in a 
tremendous battle at Breitenfeld, swept 
down the "Church lane" from Wiirtzburg 
to the Rhenish electorates, and turned on 
Bavaria. Tilly died of his wounds at Ingol- 
stadt. Wallenstein was persuaded to save 
Austria and the League. He repulsed Gus- 
tavus, who had come within sight of the 
Alps; but who had wasted his chance of 
marching to Vienna. At Liitzen (November 
6, 1632) the Swedish hero was killed; his 
star flashed and went out like a meteor. 
Wallenstein offered Saxony and Branden- 
burg peace with religious freedom; but in so 
doing, fell into treason. His death, which is 
the subject of Schiller's finest tragedy, was 
sanctioned by the Emperor. With a deed 
of assassination the German crusade came 
to an end (1634). But its fruits were not 
scanty. Ferdinand had inherited lands nine- 
tenths of whose inhabitants, it is said, held 
the Reformers' faith. He reversed these 
numbers, made Bohemia, Austria, and the 
adjacent territories Catholic, and decided 
that the Danube, as well as the Rhine, should 
flow through orthodox fields. The Imperial- 



146 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

ist victory at Nordlingen (1635) avenged 
Breitenfeld, but left Saxony Lutheran. 

Richelieu continued the war. His armies 
were successful in Roussillon and Savoy; his 
Swedish mercenaries invaded Silesia. The 
two chief Catholic powers were brought low 
by a Roman Cardinal. He died in 1642; 
but his diplomacy had traced the lines which 
in 1648, by the Peace of Westphalia, de- 
termined for one hundred and forty years 
the balance of European power. France, 
allied to the belligerent disciples of Luther 
and Calvin, flung Austria back upon its 
hereditary dominions, curbed Spain, and ful- 
filled the ambitious dreams which Francis I. 
had dreamt in vain, of a Gallic supremacy. 
Protestants were shut out from every prov- 
ince of the Habsburgs except Silesia; the 
general position reverted to that of 1624. 
Propaganda by the sword was given up on 
both sides. But the Reformed Churches 
sank under the jurisdiction of secular princes, 
and every petty Caesar became a Pope. 

Innocent X. protested against the principle 
thus made public law — formulated, curiously 
enough, in these very years by Hobbes in 
his ''Leviathan" — and Innocent's protest, 
says Lord Acton, ''is one of the glories of 



ESCORIAL TO VERSAILLES 147 

the Papacy." It was a plea for liberty of 
conscience against ''an ecclesiastical author- 
ity more arbitrary than the Pope had ever 
possessed." The Treaty bears date October 
24, 1648. In effect it dissolved the Empire. 
It brought France to the Rhine. It secular- 
ized a large portion of ecclesiastical territory. 
By recognizing the independence of Switzer- 
land and the United Provinces it acknowl- 
edged what have since been termed "accom- 
plished facts." Three "confessions/' or 
religious creeds, now divided Western Europe, 
of which the Catholic faith was only one. The 
Roman Curia, looked upon as a foreign power 
in Germany, excluded from interference in 
Spain by the Inquisition, and held at a dis- 
tance by Mazarin no less than by Richelieu, 
could no longer issue decrees which carried a 
political importance. The interdict, launched 
by Paul V. against Venice in 1605, was a 
failure and never repeated. The deposing 
power was extinct. Brandenburg, founded 
as a secular State by an heretical Grand 
Master of the Teutonic Order, was growing 
up to be the Kingdom of Prussia in 1701. 



148 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 
Section II 

THE "great king/' LOUIS XIV. (1643-1715) 

^UT few coincidences are more remarkable 
than that which links October 24, 1648, with 
January 30, 1649. German Protestants were 
yielding submission to the civil magistrate 
at the moment when English Puritans were 
beheading their King in front of Whitehall. 
At Naseby the Ironsides trained by Cromwell 
had dashed to pieces the old Csesarism, 
which claimed to establish, and thereby to 
enslave, religion. On that stricken field the 
Declaration of Independence was born. In 
all countries, too, where penal legislation 
pressed hard on Catholics, an escape was 
sought. Jesuit arguments anticipated the 
Whig limits to State authority; while in 
Maryland the famous Act of Toleration, 
likewise drawn up in 1649, announced that 
Cathohcs and Protestants could live in peace 
under the same laws. This was not a Puritan 
measure but was due to Lord Baltimore, 
whose father had joined the Roman Church. 
He ''was the first," says Bancroft, "to make 
religious freedom the basis of the State.'' 

Religious unity was declared to be impos- 
sible by the Acts of Westphalia. Cromwell 



LOUIS XIV. 149 

stood for Independence against Presbyteri- 
ans after he had smitten the head of the 
AngHcan Estabhshment. He aimed at oli- 
garchy, but the event was other than he in- 
tended. To cite the Greek illustration, every 
chief would assign the first place to himself; 
but all gave the second to Themis tocles. In- 
nocent X. decried the axiom, "Whosoever 
has the land shall write the creed.'' Jeremy 
Taylor, in hiding as a loyal Anglican, com- 
posed his defence of the "Liberty of Prophesy- 
ing." Milton in "Areopagitica" lifted the 
freedom of the press to an epic grandeur. 
Grotius had discovered, not without help of 
St. Thomas Aquinas, that there is a Higher 
Law, and that government implies a con- 
tract between ruler and subjects. On the 
other side were RicheKeu, Hobbes, Bossuet, 
Louis XrV. The debate which was thus 
opened will carry us down to the American 
and the French Revolutions, both founded 
on the doctrine of responsible authority and 
the right of resistance to its unjust use. 

In France it was a question of the Crown. 
Cardinal Bellarmine's volume, defending the 
high Papal view of jurisdiction over sover- 
eigns, was burnt in 1610 by order of the 
Parlement of Paris. The answer which Sua- 



150 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

rez wrote to James I/s exaltation of his royal 
prerogatives met with a similar fate in 1614. 
"They saw/' observes Lecky of these and 
like-minded Jesuits, "that a great future 
was in store for the people, and they laboured 
with a zeal that will secure them everlasting 
honour to hasten and direct the emanci- 
pation/' It was not now the Supreme Pon- 
tiff only, but the nation, that might depose 
and execute a tyrannical sovereign. The 
Jesuits maintained these startling doctrines, 
of course, as weapons to pull down heretical 
Tudors, or the faithless Valois, Henry III., 
or Henry of Navarre, not yet converted; 
But others besides the outspoken Mariana 
taught them from Spanish chairs of theology 
and in Rome. It was from Suarez imme- 
diately that Grotius, the Dutch Arminian, 
drew his own general principles. On the 
other hand, French jurists could point to 
the murder of these two French kings as a 
dreadful comment on theories of tyrannicide. 
Between the social contract and the divine 
indefeasible right of their glorious monarchy 
no reconciliation seemed to them possible. 

These differences had broken into violent 
discussions at the States-General of 1614, 
when the anti-regal tractate of Suarez was 



LOUIS XIV. 151 

committed to the flames. Crown lawyers 
prepared the way for a Jansenist revolt 
against Jesuit direction, though as yet Jan- 
senism was not. Later on, there was coming 
a strange, three-cornered alliance of Royalist, 
Gallican, and Port Royal, each attacking 
the Great Company from a special point of 
view, and at last effecting its overthrow. 
But the Regalists under captains like Charles 
du Moulin led the charge, although as early 
as 1554 the Sorbonne had condemned cer- 
tain Jesuit propositions. In 1594 they were 
banished the kingdom. Henry IV. gave 
them leave to return. While Richelieu lived 
he was master, and wielded the two swords 
like any Pope. The Roman authorities 
tolerated an imperium in imperio which 
they were unable to subdue; moreover 
the Cardinal was undoubtedly zealous for 
religion, though with political by-ends. 

The Jansenist controversy, which Riche- 
lieu endeavoured to stifle at its birth by 
imprisoning that gloomy genius, St. Cyran, 
in Vincennes, is usually dated from 1640. Its 
effect was to display the Papal prerogative of 
determining dogma, without appeal to Coun- 
cil or hierarchy, on the widest of theatres. 
When Innocent X. proscribed the famous 



152 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

*'Five Propositions," which represented as 
in a scientific formula the doctrine of Jansen 
(consigned to his great volume the "August- 
inus "), France and Catholic Christendom 
bowed to the ruling. The Vatican decrees 
of 1870 were anticipated by these acts; nor 
did the French bishops venture to complain. 

According to a picturesque figure, the 
Reformation had created within the Church 
a state of siege. Power was by necessity 
centred in the Pope's hands, so that while 
his temporal jurisdiction was falling away, his 
teaching and administrative functions grew 
more active than ever. Hence the defeat 
of Port Royal. Though betraying aflSni- 
ties of doctrine and temper with Calvin — 
whose logic must always impress the minds 
of Frenchmen — ^Port Royal would never 
have dared to turn Huguenot. Freedom, 
religious or political, was unknown to the age 
of Louis XIV. But, in any case, the Council 
of Trent had shown that it was impossible to 
defend the ancient creed while disobeying 
that Papal authority in which, as Bellarmine 
argued, the sum of it was contained. 

Port Royal, therefore, cast aside all that the 
Pope rejected; but distinguishing between 
doctrine and fact, it was eager to remove 



LOUIS XIV. 153 

St. Cyran, its late director, beyond the sus- 
picion of formal Jansenism. The distinction 
was not allowed and the famous Abbey be- 
came a desolation. Though Pascal, its one 
man of genius (whom it did not train), as- 
sumed with magnificent strategy the offensive 
against the Society of Jesus, bringing it into 
the line of fire, he could not save a cloister 
which the King hated because it drew away 
from him the eyes of Paris, and which Bossuet 
condemned for standing out when authority 
required it to submit. In the historical per- 
spective we recognize that if the "solitaries" 
had not been put down the Church of a middle 
way would have arisen in France, anti-Ro- 
man from the southern point of view, anti- 
Protestant from the northern. Louis and 
Bossuet were Gallican according to the for- 
mula of Pisa, Constance, Basle — French 
Councils which would fain have made the 
Pope a constitutional monarch, while the 
King was to be absolute. But Louis XIV. 
could not have grasped the spiritual sense of 
St. Cyran; nor had the incomparable orator of 
Meaux any sympathy for a doctrine which he 
must have thought less human than the Gos- 
pel, and less coherent than Calvinism. Bos- 
suet was an Augustinian, not a Jansenist. 



154 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

\ Louis XIV., during his reign of seventy- 
two years (1643-1715), arrogated to himself a 
dominion over Church and State like that of 
Philip II., to whose unique position among 
monarehs he succeeded. He was at once the 
protector of Catholic faith at home and 
abroad, the persecutor of Huguenots, the trial 
and terror of the Holy See. Ill-instructed, 
dissolute, worshipping himself as others wor- 
shipped him, the "Great King'' had wit 
enough to discern capacity and to reward 
merit. His inheritance from the age of 
Louis XIII. gave to the first half of his reign 
a lustre which was tarnished by defeat and 
misfortune in the second. But Catholic 
learning, eloquence, devotion — its benevo- 
lent enterprises and missionary zeal, lent to 
the Church of France, under the greatest of 
the Bourbons, a distinction which none other 
could rival. It had saints of charity like 
Vincent de Paul; preachers and apologists 
like Bossuet and Fenelon; the lonely splen- 
dour of Pascal, the pathos and harmonies of 
Racine. Even Port Royal, which Roman 
orthodoxy cannot approve, adds to the glory 
of the days of Louis by its austere unworldli- 
ness, its erudition — witness the names of 
Tillemont and Sacy — its proud resistance to 
King and Council., 



LOUIS XIV. 155 

But Dollinger has laid bare the vice of 
that GaUican system which for sixty years 
and more set no bounds, short of manifest 
heresy, to royal despotism. If passive obe- 
dience carried to the extreme was a badge 
of Anglicans at this time, so was it of Bossuet 
and the contemporary divines across the 
Channel, who did not perceive that they 
were applauding the wicked principles of 
Westphalia condemned by the Pope. For 
if it was chiefly the sovereign's will on which 
these GalKcans relied to destroy Port Royal, 
and if by it they justified the Revocation of 
the Edict of Nantes, how could their suc- 
cessors argue against the absolute State which 
exiled the clergy and suppressed the religious 
orders? From 1685 to 1789 the fatal logic 
that deduces anti-clericalism as a consequence 
of court-idolatry at Versailles moves on step 
by step. The persons of the drama exchange 
parts; the plot remains the same. 

It was not, therefore, by accident that 
Louis, in the same years when he meditated 
the forced conversion or banishment of his 
Huguenot subjects (as truly French as any 
Bourbon), found himself at enmity with the 
Holy See. But the moment proved decisive 
of many things. Looking back we observe 



156 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

how Charles II., purchased by French money, 
had so irritated and alarmed Protestant 
England that an imaginary Popish Plot drove 
the nation mad. This was to be followed 
up by the double intrigues of Versailles, which 
Barillon conducted in London. They were 
designed to weaken English power, and only 
in the second place to forward the progress 
of Catholicism. James II. was in the eyes 
of Frenchmen a tributary viceroy of the 
*^ Grand Monarque,'' and England a subject 
province. 

1 Now in St. Peter's chair from 1676 to 1689 
sat Innocent XL, a saintly, reforming Pontiff. 
He dreaded the overweening pretensions of 
which Louis had given proofs no less in sacred 
than in secular departments. Like his pred- 
ecessors he clung to the balance of power, 
alone adapted, since the Popes could no longer 
depose Kings, to secure the possessions of 
the Roman Church and his own independence. 
Louis XIV. had extended, with a haughty 
indifference to the Curia, his so-called "regal 
rights" over the property of vacant bishop- 
rics. Innocent remonstrated to no purpose, 
as Clement X. had done before him. A 
succession of able writers, high prelates 
among them, Richer, De Marca, Launoy, 



LOUIS XIV, 157 

Dupin, had published abroad or were still 
expounding the doctrine of a royal supremacy 
not much less limited than was maintained 
by Hooker and Andre wes. The French 
bishops obeyed their King with trembling. 
Louis, who knew nothing of theology, con- 
voked them to Paris in 1682. This Gallican 
assembly was intended to resume the attitude 
of Constance and to win for itself the author- 
ity of a General Council. Bossuet, the last of 
the Church doctors, profoundly Catholic, 
but misled by the philosophy of Hobbes, 
which on this point he took to be scriptural, 
paid an excessive deference to the King, 
whom he should have warned against med- 
dling with matters too high for him. A 
schism appeared to be imminent, and the 
Bishop of Meaux preached his masterpiece of 
rhetoric on the "Unity of the Church," 
exalting Papal claims, but demanding as if a 
novelty that the Holy See should govern by 
Canon Law. The bishops subscribed to the 
"Four Articles," which rejected utterly the 
Pope's power in temporals outside his own 
states, and denied that he was infallible ex 
cathedra. Louis imposed this declaration 
on the whole French clergy, and even the 
Jesuits submitted under constraint. Gal- 



158 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

lican theology and Regalist law had joined 
hands. But the strife was not ended. Louis 
would yet discover, in the apt words of 
Macaulay, that "having alienated one great 
section of Christendom by persecuting the 
Huguenots, he alienated another by insulting 
the Holy See." 

I Thanks to these opposed but not unseason- 
able blunders on the part of Louis, the Vatican 
at this critical turn in affairs escaped a grave 
calamity. Whoever persecuted the French 
Calvinists, it was not Innocent XL, for he 
raised his voice against "dragooning" them 
by "armed apostles," into a feigned accept- 
ance of beliefs which they rejected in their 
hearts. He is likewise happily free from a 
share in the procedure, as disastrous as it was 
short-sighted, of James 11. James, a devout 
profligate, had imbibed Gallican ideas, which 
the crafty Barillon did his utmost to encour- 
age. And by this dream of royal omnipotence 
the King drove Tory Oxford and Protestant 
England to put in practice the Jesuit principle 
of resistance, upheld by Suarez against 
James's own grandfather. The situation had 
its ironies for observant spectators. Innocent 
counselled prudence and moderation. He 
declined to make the Jesuit Father Petre a 



LOUIS XIV. 159 

Cardinal. His representative at the court of 
St. James's, Count d'Adda, submitted with 
reluctance to public honours which would 
only vex and scandalize a Protestant nation. 
And the insolent policy of Louis compelled 
the Holy See, while supporting ecclesiastical 
immunities on the Rhine, to strengthen the 
hands of William of Orange. WilHam broke 
his promise to the Vatican of toleration for 
Catholics when Innocent had passed away. 
But even so late as 1697 feeling in Rome 
continued to be anti-Jacobite. To such unex- 
pected consequences did the ''Four Articles" 
lead. Once more a French King ruined the 
fortunes of militant Catholicism, as a French 
Cardinal had ruined them in the Thirty 
Years' War. 

It was characteristic of Louis XIV. that he 
trampled on the helpless. Three times he 
had ostentatiously insulted the Popes in their 
own capital. Nevertheless, over those Four 
Articles he was beaten into submission. 
Alexander VIII. condemned them formally 
in 1691. Innocent XIL, an admirable pontiff, 
whom our English poet. Browning, has 
analysed after his peculiar fashion in "The 
Ring and the Book," dictated to the French 
bishops an act of contrition which their royal 



160 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

master permitted them to sign in 1697. 
Bossuet, doomed to weave and unweave the 
Penelope- web of a "Defence of 1682" never 
entirely to his mind, left it in manuscript, 
crying "Abeat quo libuerit/' let the Declara- 
tion take care of itself. From the Roman 
point of view this sublime genius had betrayed 
his fellow-clergy into the '^servitudes of the 
Gallican Church/' as Fleury, once their advo- 
cate, bitterly called them. Noble and grave 
as a prophetic teacher when he surveys the 
truths of religion, but like a chained eagle in 
the court of Versailles, Bossuet illustrates 
its grandeur and its fall. He it is in effect 
that utters the funeral oration of Louis 
Quatorze; and he passes with his King. 

His rival, his successor, was Fenelon, Arch- 
bishop and Duke of Cambray, whose "Tele- 
maque'' is a satire on absolute monarchy, 
and his submission to Rome the severest 
censure on the Articles of 1682. Fenelon is 
unmistakably the first French "ultramon- 
tane," as we understand the word. He is 
also the first French democrat, of the haughty 
Mirabeau type, strong on the popular side 
because he has a quarrel with Versailles. He 
stands on the threshold of a new century, and 
hails the dawn of light and freedom. There 



LOUIS XIV. 161 

was coming indeed a false dawn before the 
true. Those last days of Fenelon and 
Massillon witnessed the early unripe essays 
of Voltaire (1694-1778) in prose and rhyme; 
while the huge volumes of Saint-Simon's 
"Memoirs" were growing in secret, which 
contain in his enormous style the epitaph 
of old France; — of its King, its nobles, its 
Churchmen, its light ladies, its decadent yet 
still not white-hvered chivalry. We turn 
back to consider the course of those hundred 
and twenty years past — the Armada that was 
blown to all the winds of heaven, the Thirty 
Years' War, the Puritan Revolt, the double 
failure of Louis and James which bears in 
England the title of a Revolution, and is 
dated 1688. What does it all portend.^ A 
recent philosophic estimate assures us that 
these were steps in a process which has taken 
from the "modern State" its ascendancy over 
conscience, and shown it to be incompetent 
where the Christian faith is concerned. How, 
without legal enactment, society was to 
be kept in possession of the greatest of all 
treasures, that process did not show. It 
made for freedom, but did it not also make 
for anarchy.^ Such was the problem which 
the advancing years of the eighteenth century 
were called upon to resolve. 



CHAPTER V 

FROM LOUIS XIV. TO THE REVOLUTION (1715- 
1789. ROUSSEAU, ''the SOCIAL CON- 
TRACT ''; BURKE, "on reconciliation 

WITH America'') 

A CENTURY of enlightenment or dissolution, 
the eighteenth has been also termed the ''Age 
of Reason.'' When it began with its unneces- 
sary war of the Spanish Succession, Europe 
south of Alps and Pyrenees had exhausted 
the mental vigour which produced the Renais- 
sance, as well as the ardour of crusading 
whereby Castile and Aragon had in a short 
generation acquired the Empire now crum- 
bling to pieces. The Turk was making his 
last attempt on Christendom. Russia sud- 
denly filled the eastern sky as a Colossus 
armed for battle against the Crescent. In 
this one direction the Papacy, faithful to a 
tradition seven hundred years old, was 
deservedly a victor. St. Pius V., the soul of 
the expedition, had furnished to the hero, 
Don John of Austria, no small contingent of 

162 



TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 163 

those galleys with which near the Gulf of 
Lepanto he shattered the Turkish fleet and 
swept it from Ionian waters, October 7, 1571. 
From that day the naval power of the 
Moslems declined. In 1606 Austria con- 
cluded an honourable peace with Ahmed I., 
which indicated that the mighty empire of 
Islam had lost its long-enduring vital force. 
Yet Poland was compelled to pay tribute in 
1672, and eleven years later Hungarian Prot- 
estants brought up a great Turkish army to 
the walls of Vienna. The Pope, Innocent XL, 
did his utmost to aid the Christian cause, 
and John Sobieski, "sent from God," raised 
the siege. A war of twenty years followed 
with varying success; but in 1697 Prince 
Eugene broke the infidel ranks at Zenta and 
completely routed them. It will be observed 
that France and England almost always 
behaved as friends of the Turk. The Peace 
of Carlo witz, January, 1699, checked the 
Sultan's aggressive power; he entered on 
compulsion the European system of politics; 
and in Holy Russia, with its pride of faith 
and lust of conquest, he found his waning 
strength overmatched. 

Eight Popes, from Clement XL, elected in 
November, 1700, to Pius VT., dying in exile 



164 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

at Valence, August 29, 1799, fill the years of 
which every Catholic will say that he has 
no pleasure in them. Years when the spirit 
which had animated Christians to such lofty 
deeds was everywhere yielding before its 
assailants. After the Treaty of Westphalia, 
the bounds were fixed between Catholics and 
Reformers as they have since remained. 
Looking at the map of Europe, we are struck 
by observing that the limits which the Ro- 
man Church preserved very nearly coincide 
with those of the Western Empire, at the time 
that Theodosius divided East and West (395). 
North and east of Danube, Main, and Rhine 
the Catholic dominion is met by peoples whom 
that Empire never held or imperfectly sub- 
dued. But beyond its range Poland on one 
side, Ireland on the other, furnish examples 
of the Roman faith, enthusiastically main- 
tained under pressure from the alien Govern- 
ments of Moscow or London. Across the 
Atlantic, Rome may point to the whole 
South American continent, to the Central 
States, Mexico, and French Canada as her 
own. She has called a new world into being 
to repair the losses inflicted on Catholicism in 
the old. Her missionaries have penetrated 
into India, converted multitudes in Japan, 



TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 1G5 

found a welcome at the Court of Peking. 
These were, in largest measure, trophies of the 
heroism which has at all times marked Jesuit 
enterprise among the heathen. St. Francis 
Xavier, a Christian Alexander, meditated the 
conquest of Farther Asia, and left to his suc- 
cessors a promising empire, which Japanese 
persecution, Dutch intrigue, and the opposi- 
tion of other Catholics hindered from its due 
expansion. But the pride of the Great Com- 
pany was Paraguay, civilized and defended 
as an Indian Paradise by these "black- 
robes," who renewed on their own principles 
a polity resembling in more than one feature 
the social institutions which Pizarro found 
existing under the Incas of Peru. 

And now, when Louis XIV. had acquired 
for his house the throne of Spain, supplanting 
the Habsburgs, and securing to the Bourbons 
a masterdom over the Latin nations, there was > 
approaching a universal change which con- 
stituted, as Macaulay reckons it, "'the fourth 
great peril of the Church of Rome." On 
lines not similar but converging the attack 
was directed, by Jansenist lawyers, philo- 
sophic thinkers, and the party of letters and 
fashion called Libertines. 

First came so determined a recoil from the 
austerity which Louis affected after his mar- 



166 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

riage with Madame de Maintenon, that Lecky 
describes it as a "moral chaos/' Such was 
the period of the Regency, illustrated for later 
ages in Saint-Simon's "Memoirs'' — a picture 
to frighten and appal. It was an era closely 
imitating that of Charles 11., but adding the 
touch of sacrilege in a prelate like Cardinal 
Dubois, who disgraced the See of Cambray 
which Fenelon had lately adorned. We 
may fix the date by Montesquieu's "Persian 
Letters," brilliant and corrupt, appearing in 
1722. This daring mockery of Christian 
beliefs occupies the same place, as regards the 
"Enlightenment," which Luther's "Baby- 
lonish Captivity" holds in the story of the 
Reformation. It is a prophecy and a form of 
strategy, well named "persiflage." Luther's 
weapon was vehement satire, descending to 
coarseness. The weapon of the "philo- 
sophes" was irony which spared no dogma, 
however sacred. All along, from the earliest 
period when literature began to revive, this 
temper had shown what it could achieve in 
French writings. But Rabelais was often 
grotesque, Montaigne was archaic. The 
scepticism of Charron had been coloured to 
resemble Christian humility. And though 
Descartes is justly esteemed the Father of 
Rationalism, he professed the Catholic creed. 



TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 167 

But his creed was forgotten, while his 
method formed Spinoza, Locke, and the 
whole eighteenth century. 

Since Pascal and Moliere, the French 
language, conscious of its power to charm, 
to explain, to persuade, while it amused, was 
fast becoming the speech of cultivated men 
and women all over Europe. Not, however, 
the French of Bossuet, but the French of Saint 
Evremond, soon to be sharpened into an 
edge of lightning by Voltaire. Unbelief had 
fashioned a tongue marvellously adapted to 
the task it set itself of destructive analysis. 
English Deism in Locke and his followers 
gave the ideas which, by passing into lucid 
French epigrams, became the sovereign com- 
monplaces on which laws were to be re- 
formed, schools turned to seminaries of 
propaganda, the clergy put to shame, the 
Church annihilated. By opposing Protestant 
objections to Catholic dogma, and to both a 
Christianity without mysteries, the first steps 
were taken. Religion had been an engine of 
state; reduced to a superstition or a senti- 
ment, how could it survive when scientific 
investigation disclosed its origin, and history 
narrated its abuses.^ The "Encyclopaedia," 
or sum of knowledge, treated Catholic and 
Protestant alike with transcendent disdain. 



168 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

They belonged to the past, they destroyed 
one another. The record of persecution 
condemned them both. 

Such were Voltaire's tactics, made perfect 
in a long career of reflection and subterfuge. 
His hundred volumes contain the gospel of 
"Enlightenment''; but, though a prince 
among unbelievers, he had companions not 
less ardent or less resolute, in all ranks of 
society. Governments adopted large portions 
of the new faith, many years before it touched 
the people. On the side of orthodoxy no 
David came out to answer the challenge. It 
is remarkable that we cannot quote one single 
classic in French, Spanish, or Italian, belong- 
ing to this period and professing to defend 
Christianity, after the death of Fenelon till 
the Revolution. In England, writers of 
eminence, from Butler to Paley, answered 
the Deists and silenced them; but under 
Louis XV. the thrice-miserable disputes con- 
cerning the Bull "Unigenitus" of Clement 
XI., which convulsed Court and Parlement, 
and which ended in the downfall of the Society 
of Jesus, appear to have absorbed whatever 
intellectual zeal was left in the clergy. It 
was a time of decadence among believers, and 
of assaults upon them continually growing 
in boldness, during which "acts of power/' 



TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 169 

feebly attempted from above, were met 
with defiance, or parried by comiivance of 
the authorities themselves. 

"Louis XV.," wrote in his secret Memoirs 
the Marquis d'Argenson, ''has not known how 
to govern as a tyrant or as the chief of a 
republic." These words express the vacilla- 
ting policy of a court which felt already the 
ground tremblmg beneath it. By the Consti- 
tution "Unigenitus," which Louis XIV. ob- 
tained from the unwillmg Pope, Clement XL, 
in 1713, it was intended that the King should 
be enabled to scatter the remnants of Jansen- 
ism. But Jansenism, ceasing to be a definite 
heresy, had gro\^m into a temper of mind, 
rebellious towards Rome, Gallican and dis- 
loyal, or at least in sympathy republican. 
It took refuge from its enemies at Versailles 
in the Parlement of Paris, where D'Argenson 
found the "leaders of this revolution" 
which he saw coming, and which was to open 
with "the slaughter of priests in the streets 
of Paris." In 1730 the Papal Bull was made 
a law of the land. But the Parlement (which 
we must not confound with our English 
institution of the like name) resisted, and 
got itself exiled to Pontoise, to Soissons. 
Church and State lay imder the heel of a 
Madame de Pompadour, whose influence 



170 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

was courted by virtuous prelates, such as 
Cristophe de Beaumont, Archbishop of Paris, 
and by austere jurists, while she wavered 
to and fro, now telling the Archbishop that 
the Jesuits ought to be suppressed as a 
*' scourge to Kings," and again, when the 
mood of repentance took her, choosing a 
Jesuit confessor. To record ignominies of 
this kind is humiliation enough. 

( The Parlement won its great victory over 
the Jesuits after 1757, when Damien made 
his insane attempt on King Louis. Rumour 
falsely charged both religious parties with 
Damien's guilt. The public conscience felt 
a shock; but it was the Society of Jesus that 
paid the penalty. Toulouse and Paris joined 
against them, and their standard book of 
moral theology, "'Busenbaum,'' was burnt 
by the public executioner, on the ground that 
it made the Pope superior to princes and 
appeared to countenance assassination. In 
brief, the Jesuits were now to suffer destruc- 
tion as Ultramontanes, democrats, and regi- 
cides. Like the Christians as described in 
Tacitus, they were called "enemies of the 
human race." This was the Jesuit legend, in 
which serious men have professed to believe, 
and which has gone the round of the world. 

: From Portugal, decrepit since its heroic 



TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 171 

adventures in the East, the first blow came. 
We should fix clearly in our minds that the 
Society of Jesus formed the Old Guard of a 
religion which these Latin States had pro- 
tected by fire and sword against Mohammed, 
against Luther, and that their Governments 
knew this well. Moreover, it was impossible 
to dissolve the Society without using violence, 
moral and even physical, towards the Pope 
whose chosen instrument it had ever been. 
The English parallel of Charles I. and Straf- 
ford corresponds exactly to the situation. 
But Strafford had some kind of trial, though 
his judgment was decided by attainder, not 
upon evidence. The Jesuits underwent ban- 
ishment, confiscation, dishonour, and dissolu- 
tion without trial, or definite charges, or 
opportunity of self-defence. The argument 
of lawyer St. John, pleading for Strafford's 
doom, would have mightily persuaded Pombal 
and Aranda, ''It was never accounted either 
cruelty or foul play to knock foxes and wolves 
on the head as they can be found, because 
they be beasts of prey.'' As Clarendon 
remarks of the earlier injustice, "the law 
and the humanity were alike." 

The Bourbons destroyed the Jesuits, and 
were themselves destroyed in turn by the 
forces which they had let loose. Their chief 



172 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

ministers, and Pombal who set the example at 
Lisbon, belonged to a new class, fiercely 
anti-clerical, inspired by "philosophy," by 
the regalist conception of absolute power. 
Such were Choiseul in France, Aranda at 
Madrid, Tanucci at Naples. Liberty of the 
subject was to all of them an unknown 
idea, voluntary association an act of treason. 
But they justified their lawless proceedings 
under the specious popular terms of humanity, 
freedom, and light. As Damien's attempt 
on the King proved the beginning of sorrows 
to French Jesuits, so did a like assault on 
Joseph of Portugal, September, 1758, enable 
his minister, Pombal, to complete the work 
already in hand, by which he intended to get 
rid of the Society in that kingdom. They 
were accused of regicide; flung on board a 
number of transports, and shipped off to 
the Papal States. All the possessions of 
the Jesuits were seized; Malagrida, though 
charged with complicity in the attack on 
King Joseph, was put to death not as a traitor, 
but as a heretic. The real offence, which 
Pombal could not overlook, was that in 
America the Jesuits had opposed a scheme 
by which their Indian converts were to be 
forcibly taken from the "Reductions" and 
transferred to the Portuguese crown. Para- 



TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 173 

guay fell into its primitive wildness; the 
Society perished in the cause of civilization. 
Now came their last days in France. 
One of their Fathers, Lavalette, had engaged 
at Martinique in business on a large scale, 
contrary to the spirit of the Society, if not to 
its rules. He owed three millions of francs 
to houses at Marseilles. The ships which were 
taking his merchandise across the Atlantic 
fell into British hands; and in 1761 Lavalette 
was declared a bankrupt by the Grande 
Chambre of Paris. The General of the 
Jesuits, Ricci, declined to be responsible. 
The Parlement examined and condemned the 
Rule of the Order; burnt many more of their 
books; and compelled Louis XV. to ask at 
Rome for a French Vicar who should govern 
in his kingdom without consulting the 
General. He was answered by Ricci or 
Clement XHL, "Let them be as they are, or 
not be at all." The second alternative was 
adopted. On August 6, 1762, the Parlement 
flung one hundred and sixty-three Jesuit 
writings into the flames and announced that 
the Society was dissolved in French territory. 
Diderot exulted; Voltaire pointed to the 
ruins of Port Royal, and observed pleasantly 
that Pere Letellier, confessor of Louis XIV., 
ha-d sown where Lavalette reaped. Shut out 



174 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

from their own schools, reduced to beggary, 
driven into exile, the formal decree which 
made an end of them was published by Louis 
XV. in November, 1764. Not a single French 
Jesuit underwent trial; their suppression, 
with its attendant robbery and suffering, was 
an act of legal or illegal violence. 

Clement XIII. undertook to defend the 
Society in the Constitution "Apostolicum,'' 
January, 1765. It led by reaction to the 
secret ordinance of Charles III., King of 
Spain — composed by his Prime Minister, 
Aranda — which on April 2, 1767, dissolved the 
greatest of all Spanish religious companies, 
and drove them out of the land as if they had 
been Moors or Jews. Five thousand, de- 
spatched to Civita Vecchia, found a refuge in 
Corsica, not until they had endured frightful 
miseries. The "philosophers" were not sure 
that to destroy the Jesuits would be entirely 
to their own advantage. D'Alembert wrote 
on behalf of the Society; Voltaire preferred 
the Jesuit fox to the Jansenist wolf. The 
Parlement of Paris had burnt many anti- 
Christian pamphlets; and, in fact, the Civil 
Constitution of the Clergy, to be promulgated 
during the Revolution, was due to Galilean 
authors, not to the "Enlightenment." Vol- 
taire detested every shade of Calvinism; he 



TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 175 

had begun to write an answer to Pascal's 
*' Provincial Letters"; and, as owing much 
to his old Jesuit teachers, he felt an attach- 
ment to the Society which was remarkable 
in so determined an enemy of their faith. 

Rousseau, the lay Calvin, now published 
his "Emile," which set forth a secular 
programme of education, and the "Social 
Contract," destined to be the cornerstone of 
all future democracy, as understood and 
practised by Jacobins. No defence of the 
Jesuit doctrines or principles appeared. They 
took their fate in silence. Even at Rome 
they waited with apprehension for the stroke 
which might be dealt by the hand of St. 
Peter's successor. Clement XIII. died on 
the eve of a consistory, where the question of 
their abolition was about to be considered, in 
1769. On May 19, Ganganelli, a Franciscan 
friar, began to reign in his stead. 

This is the unhappy and much criticized 
Clement XIV., whose brief days were con- 
sumed in a struggle for and against the Soci- 
ety. But no human power could avert their 
doom. A strange sight was now witnessed. 
The Bourbon powers urged their instant dis- 
solution as an alternative to worse things. 
France held Avignon and proposed to incor- 
porate it with the monarchy, unless Clement 



176 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

gave in without delay. He was able to rejoin 
that Protestant Governments (he meant 
Frederick II. of Prussia) and the Empress 
Catherine, were opposed to any change in 
the religious status of their Catholic subjects. 
But on July 22, 1769, Cardinal Bernis, 
himself no pattern of priestly decorum, 
representing Louis XV., made a formal 
demand in the name of France, Spain, and 
Naples, that Rome should abolish the Order. 
Bernis offered as a lure the restoration of 
Avignon and Beneventum, which latter had 
been occupied by Naples. The Holy See 
had indeed fallen from its high estate when 
effete Bourbon princes could deal with it so 
despitefuUy. Clement XIV. might have com- 
pared his position to that of Clement V., 
except in so far as he had made no bargain 
with the French King. And the Jesuits 
were, at least, as innocent as the great body 
of the Templars; but not even the shadow 
of a particular examination was vouchsafed to 
them. For an hour, in 1771, on the disgrace 
of Choiseul, men thought they were saved. 
D'Aiguillon, grand-nephew of Richelieu, suc- 
ceeded — by grace of Madame du Barri, as the 
wits of Paris cried out — and D'Aiguillon was 
no Jansenist. These hopes were vain. The 
Brief of dissolution, submitted to Versailles 



TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 177 

but sent back unread to the Spanish Court, 
where it had been approved, was dehvered on 
the evening of August 16, 1773, to the General 
of the Jesuits in his own house at Rome. 
Ricci was taken to the EngKsh College, and 
thence to St. Angelo, where he died next year. 
The Society, as a religious corporation, had 
ceased to exist. 

It may be worth while to remark that the 
Brief "Dominus ac Redemptor,'' of July 21, 
1773, by which this momentous transaction 
was formally concluded, is not in any sense, on 
Catholic principles, dogmatic or infallible. It 
gave effect to a measure of high policy, done 
by Clement XIV. as ruler of the Church and 
on motives of interest, not of doctrine. That 
such a measure lay wdthin the Papal com- 
petence, on which religious orders depend for 
approval, has never been questioned. It did 
not, however, imply that the Holy See with- 
drew from the teaching of former Jesuits any 
favour bestowed; and their remarkable at- 
tempt to substitute for the severe systems of 
Aquinas or Augustine the milder view which 
Molina and his school defended, was per- 
mitted still. The shafts of Pascal had pierced 
a too-indulgent morality, not peculiar to those 
individual Jesuits who maintained it, nor of 
their invention. Pope Innocent XI. had 



178 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

condemned propositions that relaxed the fibres 
of Christian ethics. But the Jesuit system, as 
a whole, was renewed by St. Alfonso del 
Liguori during the years which we are now 
describing, and the fact signifies much. As 
a school of theology and morals, the Company 
of Jesus underwent no censure from Rome. 
It was not condemned but dissolved. 

The circumstances which attended its disso- 
lution prove that Clement XIV. acted under 
extreme pressure from the Church's enemies. 
The terms of his preamble, which recites how 
complaints and controversies had waited on 
the steps of the Society from its first days, 
are deliberately chosen, so as to avoid a 
judgment on the merits. The Order was to 
be sacrificed that peace in the Church might 
be restored. Cardinal Bernis considered the 
Brief ''as lenient as possible towards the 
Jesuits." They were gently dealt with; 
yet not unfairly they claimed some of the 
honours of martyrdom. In Prussia and 
Russia, where the Papal decree was never 
legally published, they found protection and 
continued to exist, not without such approval 
as the Holy See could venture to give. This 
has been made a reproach to the Fathers; 
but if they took advantage of technical points 
and tacit understandings, who shall be hard 



THE AMERICAN STATES 179 

on them? Nothing was more evident than 
that the Holy See would reinstate them as an 
order on the first opportunity given. The 
Silesian Jesuits elected a Vicar-general; those 
in White Russia did the same in 1782. Though 
smitten, as it would seem, unto death, a future 
was in store for the Society; but another 
world-wide movement must avenge them on 
the Bourbons ere it dawned. 



Section II 

OLD MONAECHIES AND THE AMERICAN STATES 

(1763-1789) 

These kings, of whom the least incapable 
was Charles III., did all they knew to hasten 
its coming. In the German Empire, that 
confused welter of principalities, lay and 
ecclesiastical; in Austria, when the noble 
woman Maria Theresa passed away, the 
like suicidal policy was adopted. The elec- 
tors along the Rhine, prelates of great houses 
who committed their spiritual duties to 
inferior bishops and went hunting or did 
worse, thought to be independent of the 
Holy See, as already they had shaken off 
the Imperial yoke. A semi-Jansenist, semi- 
Gallican coadjutor of Treves, Von Hontheim, 



180 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

composed the manifesto which none of them 
could write, and gave it to the world in 
1763 under the name of Febronius. It is 
a plea for national Churches in the spirit of 
Henry VIII. Going far beyond the language 
and ideas of Bossuet or Fleury, it would have 
set up the mere episcopal system after pulling 
down the Pope, making him a titular first 
among equals, with no jurisdiction outside 
Rome. Febronius underwent condemnation 
by the Holy See; he denied his book, and 
formally submitted. But the electors did not 
cease from troubling by their "Articles" 
of Cologne and ''Points of Ems," until 
the Revolution came and took them all 
away. 

In Austria, Joseph II., whom "Old Fritz" 
called "my brother the sacristan" (1780- 
1792), reproduced the mighty Tudor legis- 
lation in a very poor copy, suppressing 
monasteries, regulating public worship, while 
he was scorned by Freethinkers as by earnest 
Catholics, and displayed the peculiar in- 
competence of a royal person who meddles 
with religion. Protestants and Jews were 
reheved from their disabilities, for toleration 
had been proclaimed the order of the day. 
But all monasticism was put down, for 
Enlightenment demanded that superstition 



THE AMERICAN STATES 181 

should no longer be encouraged; neither did 
it object to the confiscation by the State of 
property held on a rehgious tenure. Pope 
Pius VI., the "Apostolic pilgrim/' travelled 
to Vienna in 1782, hoping that he might per- 
suade Joseph II. to alter his policy. The 
journey gave striking evidence that a Roman 
Pontiff could still reckon upon the devotion 
of multitudes in Catholic lands. It was a 
first intimation that the Church would one 
day throw herself upon the people. But no 
other good came of that pilgrimage; and it 
furnished a precedent when Napoleon sum- 
moned Pius VII. to crown him at Notre 
Dame as the new Charlemagne. 

We have uttered the spell-breaking and 
spell-binding name which tells us that Revo- 
lution stands at the doors. It had crossed 
the Atlantic with Franklin and Lafayette. 

America, says a thoughtful writer, applying 
Bacon's phrase about his own system to facts 
in history, was "the greatest birth of time." 
Emphatically the ''New World," it not only 
doubled man's earthly dominion but gave 
to his experiments a scope without limit. 
Utopia might be found or created across the. 
ocean. To plant a second Europe, the mere 
imitation of the first, on Atlantic shores, 
was not possible; for how set up Emperor, 



182 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

Pope, or a permanent feudal system where no 
such institutions had grown, while the original 
claimed supremacy and would not suffer 
competition? In the secrets of the future 
lay two ideas which America was destined 
to realize, and which their advocates would 
term Democracy and Disestablishment. The 
people were to be the State, and the State was 
not to be lord of the Church. In Europe, 
hitherto, a republic had been no more than 
a monarchy discrowned; man, as man, was 
not a citizen, but only man as in some way 
qualified; such is the exact meaning of the 
term ''franchise," a right which I have and 
you have not. The liberties of a city were its 
boundaries, shutting out king, noble, prelate. 
Individual freedom could not exist save by 
a charter. Humanity, in itself, gave no claim 
at law. It is true that Roman jurisconsults 
employed a language that has left its traces 
on the political dissertations of the eighteenth 
century. But until America "shouted to 
Liberty," as Grattan finely said, all freedom 
was privilege. When her voice was heard 
privilege made ready for battle. This is the 
story of mankind since, in Boston Harbour, 
certain chests of tea were flung overboard by 
the natives of Massachusetts disguised as 
Red Indians. America has led, Europe has 



THE AMERICAN STATES 183 

followed. Bishop Berkeley sang this great 
consummation, 

Westward the course of empire takes its way. 

The first four acts already past, 
A fifth shall close the drama with the day. 

Time's noblest offspring is the last. 

While Christendom was one, and religious 
unity existed, the ideal embodied in the 
Holy Roman Empire could inspire poets, 
govern laws, and protect faith. In the cen- 
tury of enlightenment, as Voltaire said, the 
phantom which bore this title was "neither 
holy, nor Roman, nor empire"; religious 
unity had given place to sects ever more 
numerous; unbelievers were to be found 
in every country of Europe. How then was 
it possible to carry on a government which 
supposed that all its subjects held one creed .f^ 
Establishment and a Test Act had been the 
rule in England. The wars of religion laid 
waste Germany. To banish Huguenots and 
put Jansenists outside the law had failed to 
bring religious peace among Frenchmen. 
Now the Society of Jesus was persecuted in 
its turn; and where would the lex talionis 
end its ravages.^ 

One thing was clear, — the old founda- 
tions of the State were hopelessly shattered. 



184 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

Monarchy, as D'Argenson perceived before 
1750, was undermined by the RepubHcan 
sentiment which demanded equal laws and 
liberty of conscience for all. These conclu- 
sions, not due to speculative philosophers, 
came as a natural consequence after Ver- 
sailles had shown how impotent was a 
*' Great King'' to secure the prosperity of 
his kingdom. The banished Huguenots had 
beaten Louis XIV.; Port B-oyal in ruins 
was a Jansenist victory. Elsewhere, Penal 
Statutes were falling into discredit; and the 
Catholic Church, in Ireland or in Austria, 
sighed for freedom. In a divided Christen- 
dom the system of the Middle Ages could no 
longer be maintained. It was fast becoming 
a memory or an ideal. 

Lord Baltimore had recognized these facts, 
at the very time when Puritans were building 
states in New England on the principle of 
exclusion. The Statutes of Maryland mark 
the beginnings of equality before the law, 
as it was afterwards proclaimed in the 
Declaration of Independence (1776). The 
first amendment of 1791 to that Declaration 
says, ^'Congress shall make no law respecting 
an establishment of religion, or prohibiting 
the free exercise thereof, or abridging the 
freedom of speech or of the press.'' Religious 



THE AMERICAN STATES 185 

liberty was thus made a fundamental law of 
the United States. It had been already ad- 
mitted in Pennsylvania. Now it became a 
cornerstone of Democracy, to be practised 
on the largest dimensions of any political or- 
ganism extant among men. The Amendment 
directly contradicted the Jus reformandi 
granted to rulers by the Peace of Westphalia. 
It withdrew from cognisance of the State 
religious questions, leaving them to be 
decided by a higher tribunal. 

Such was the American solution, which we 
may associate with Washington's name. The 
French, to be considered hereafter, was de- 
rived in its earlier stage from the Jansenists, 
who dictated the Civil Constitution of the 
clergy in 1790; and its final shape as the 
Concordat is due to Napoleon. It contra- 
dicts the American idea no less evidently 
than the American overthrows the system of 
Westphalia. In the French declaration of 
the Rights of Man and the citizen ''liberty 
ot worship'' is described as so natural that 
only the presence of tyranny requires it 
to be explicitly mentioned. The Constituent 
assembly and Napoleon thought otherwise. 
To the Catholic religion, in particular, so the 
Constitution and the First Consul declared, 
protection was due; but from the clergy both 



186 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

exacted a servitude as complete as it had 
ever been under Louis XIV. 

Let us take these clues to guide us through 
the French Revolution, which was wrecked 
as a movement towards freedom when it 
touched the Rock of St. Peter. That is no 
figure of speech, it is truth of history. Or, 
looking upon the peace and progress whereby 
the American Union has become, in Lord 
Acton's words, "a community more powerful, 
more prosperous, more intelligent, and more 
free than any other which the world has 
seen,'' we may ask the reason why. So 
far as language can make them identical, the 
French Rights of Man do not differ from those 
upheld by the Declaration of Independence. 
Why then had France religious troubles 
culminating under the Republic in the Ven- 
dean tragedy, while Napoleon after signing 
the Concordat deposed and imprisoned the 
Pope with whom he had made it.^ The 
answer to this question, if it can be found, 
will give us a master key to present and future 
problems on both sides of the Atlantic. 



CHAPTER VI 

from the revolution to waterloo (1789- 
1815. chateaubriand, " genius of 
christianity." consalvi and pacca, 
'"meivioirs") 

The American Revolution nearly coincides 
with the death of Louis XV. Counting from 
1624, when Richelieu took the reins, one 
hundred and fifty years had gone by, during 
which the French Ejng was the State and the 
Church personified; but the people, the 
Tiers Etat, were nothing. The clergy, indeed, 
constituted a self-taxing body, and as an 
estate of the realm met regularly for the 
despatch of business. High Court prelates, 
in France as elsewhere, often led unchristian 
lives. A few bishops and abbots enjoyed 
excessive revenues; the clergy were ill-paid, 
shamefully neglected, and handled with a deal 
of scorn, even by that Cristophe de Beau- 
mont already named, who was an edifying 
Archbishop of Paris, and very unlike Cardinal 
de Retz, his predecessor of the Fronde in 
1660. Living away from Marly and other 
king's houses, the French priest was, by the 

187 



188 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

testimony of all that knew him, devout, 
unworldly, his people's friend, and at heart 
democratic, but not disloyal. In 1789 he was 
called upon to send his representatives to the 
States-General at Versailles. He did so, and 
these "democrats in cassocks,'' to the num- 
ber of one hundred and forty-nine, went over 
en masse to the Third Estate (June 19, 1789), 
to be followed by the rest of the clerical 
deputies, thus creating a National Assembly 
that was to "conquer its king." To this 
extent the clergy made the Revolution with 
a willing heart. 

They did more. On August 4, 1789, in one 
single session at night, the whole regime of 
feudalism was overturned. It is not easy to 
improve on the sentence in which this por- 
tentous change has been summed up, "Lib- 
erty, until now known as privilege, was 
henceforward to be identified with equality." 
The clergy were willing to commute their 
tithe; they surrendered to the nation rights 
held sacred and inviolable for over a thousand 
years. The Fourth of August is certainly a 
touching moment in human story. It lays 
bare the generous heart of France; it justifies 
the enthusiasm which burst into lyric expres- 
sion on the lips of Charles Fox and in the 
poetry of Wordsworth; but it was a moment 



TO WATERLOO 189 

too beautiful to last. And as regards the 
clergy, their action grandly illustrates the 
saying of the Italian priest who was likewise 
an Itahan patriot, Rosmini, at another critical 
epoch, "Liberty and equality are the essence 
of the priesthood/' When, on August 8, 
1789, the Marquis de Lacoste moved to pay a 
new loan out of Church funds and to abolish 
tithe, not one ecclesiastic opposed him. 
Sieyes, keenest and strangest of French clerics 
who have been statesmen, protested that 
the landlord would gain what the clergy 
lost, and this very thing came to pass. On 
August 11 the Church gave up its claim. Dis- 
endowment was begun; but disestablishment, 
which would have brought freedom to religion, 
was an idea too liberal for any French Govern- 
ment effectively to grant it. 

On August 26 the Declaration of the Rights 
of Man was voted; it makes no mention of an 
established Church. The "voluntary sys- 
tem'' would have implied one of two things — 
either to give the Free Church compensation 
for its property, now taken over by the State; 
or to let it go penniless and find support in 
the generosity of its adherents. A third 
course was decreed in the Civil Constitution of 
the Clergy. They became salaried officials 
governed by a Minister of Worship; and a 



190 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

department of State like any other. Priests 
were to be appointed, by election, that is to 
say, by the votes of citizens, no matter what 
their belief; and the Holy See was no longer 
to institute bishops. In one word, the Rights 
of Man had brought forth a National Church 
unable to move hand or foot without per- 
mission of a State official who need not be a 
Christian. This pattern has been imitated 
in all Constitutions moulded on the principles 
of 1789. It is the Latin democratic model. 
It led up to the flight and execution of Louis 
XVL, the Reign of Terror, the War in La 
Vendee. It created the deep gulf which on the 
Continent separates Rome from the modern 
State. As in substance adopted by the 
Bourbons after their Restoration in 1814, it 
weakened and divided their followers until 
they were thrust out for good and all during 
the Three Days of July, 1830. 

But to leave these consequences for the 
present, we remark that Talleyrand, still 
Bishop of Autun, and Mirabeau (October 10, 
November 10, 1789) carried through the 
Assembly a law which placed the whole prop- 
erty of the French Church at Government dis- 
posal; and notes assigned on it, "assignats," 
were issued soon afterwards. In February, 
1790, monastic vows were deprived of legal 



TO WATERLOO 191 

effect, religious orders suppressed, and all 
future institutions of the kind forbidden. 
*' Liberty of worship" was guaranteed by the 
Rights of Man. These measures furnished a 
commentary on them, speaking more loudly 
than that most eloquent text, and pointing 
its significance to Catholics outside France. 
But the Assembly went farther. It imposed 
an oath, amounting to a dogmatic affirma- 
tion, on bishops and clergy, which ^' broke 
the alliance between the cures and the 
commons," and compelled the Holy See to 
intervene. Jansenist influences, guided by Le 
Camus and Treilhard, decided its form. The 
month of May, 1790, marks the dividing and 
fatal line, at which the Revolution broke off 
from the Roman Church. By "a series of 
hostile enactments, carefully studied and long 
pursued," the Assembly turned into implac- 
able enemies a clergy that desired nothing 
more ardently than freedom. America, choos- 
ing to stand by its Declaration, had secured to 
itseK the world's leadership. France, wedded 
to Louis XIV., in spite of its bill of divorce, 
entered on the path of anti-clerical persecu- 
tion which it is treading still, one hundred and 
twenty years after religious liberty was pro- 
claimed to be the inalienable right of all men. 
Home, as its custom is, moved slowly, out 



192 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

of consideration for Louis XVI., and because 
any concessions to the new order of things 
would instantly provoke similar demands on 
the part of Continental rulers elsewhere. The 
new bishoprics, revenues, and local powers of 
election, if safeguarded, might not be alto- 
gether declined; but the Holy See would 
never give up the right of institution. While 
the Cardinals were deliberating, Louis, under 
the eyes of an infuriated populace, set his 
seal to the Constitution. Thus were created, 
says Lord Acton, '"the motive and the 
machinery of civil war.'' It broke out 
immediately. The country rang with dissen- 
sions between "Nonjurors" and "Consti- 
tutionals.'' The Abbe Gregoire took the 
oath (December 27, 1790), and many thou- 
sands of clergy, perhaps nearly one-third, 
followed his example. But Pius VI. in March, 
1791, condemned the Church legislation, and 
it was rejected without delay by all except a 
handful of bishops, by the clergy at large, 
and by most Catholics. 

Here, too, was a fresh beginning. The 
Pope came into direct contact with a Church 
that his predecessors had been accustomed 
to guide by means of the State. The Civil 
Constitution, by which it was intended to 
set up a Gallican democracy, called out the 



TO WATERLOO 193 

reaction whose mouthpiece, in the next 
period, would be Count Joseph de Maistre. 
When the French Church rose again, it 
would have ceased to be Gallican, and the 
Articles of 1682 would no longer awaken 
fervour in clerical assemblies. Rather than 
swear an oath which Rome considered equal 
to apostasy, the King fled. He was brought 
back in triumph; and the Legislative pro- 
ceeded to deprive "refractory" priests of their 
stipends and to decree their banishment. 
These measures of November, 1791, and May, 
1792, Louis refused to sign. He became "Mon- 
sieur Veto." The Tuileries were stormed on 
August 10, 1792, and the monarchy of Clovis, 
Charlemagne, and St. Louis, the oldest in 
Europe, fell before the Paris commune, led 
to the assault by Jacobins. 

After this fashion, thanks to a union of 
forces partly Gallican, partly anti-Christian, 
France at one blow lost King and Constitu- 
tion. Nonjuring priests were ordered to leave 
the country without delay. For such as re- 
fused obedience, transportation to Guiana was 
the penalty. A price was set on their heads. 
Their crime the new rulers called "incivisme." 
The word was happily chosen; the idea came 
from Rousseau and the Social Contract. 
Priests who would not swear to the religion 



194 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

of State were to be deprived of its protection, 
put outside the law, and treated as wild 
beasts to be shot wherever seen. In Septem- 
ber, 1793, atheism was decreed. The Chris- 
tian year had been abolished twelve months 
earlier. Churches were closed all over France 
or became ''Temples of Reason.'" Gregoire, 
sitting alone in the Convention as a legal 
bishop, defended freedom even for Catholics. 
But the guillotine, the drownings in the Loire, 
the destruction of La Vendee, gave him his 
answer. Persecution renewed the scenes of 
primitive martyrdom, the catacombs, the 
prisons sanctified by Christian heroism. 
Monks and nuns were slaughtered; the French 
wife and mother now became enthusiastically 
Catholic, while the husband was indifferent 
or a poltroon. The two Frances, never since 
reconciled, were definitely forming. 

The Terror passed; but even in October, 
1797, death was ordered by law to be inflicted 
on emigrant priests who should return, and 
until the elections of 1797 ''every priest was 
in fact, as well as in theory, in deadly peril." 
There was a remnant of the Constitutional 
Church, discredited and enslaved. What the 
French Catholics wanted was the old religion; 
many were no longer royalists; and if the 
American statesmen had been consulted they 



TO WATERLOO 195 

would have given the word ''freedom*' as 
their advice to governors and governed. On 
September 1, 1797, a law was enacted, but 
almost immediately repealed, which looked in 
this direction. Between that date and No- 
vember, 1799, lettres de cachet, involving trans- 
portation or death, were issued against 9951 
priests in France and Belgium, accused of 
"fanaticism." Bonaparte might well ask, as 
he did at Toulon on his way to Egypt, "Have 
the soldiers of liberty become executioners.^" 
But the speaker himseK had made possible 
the crime which in these words he reprobated; 
for it was Bonaparte who, on the 18 of Fructi- 
dor (September 4, 1797), gave supreme power 
into the hands of the Jacobin Directory. His 
campaigns in Italy were for conquest and 
plunder, varnished with phrases taken from 
the revolutionary jargon. But he was 
pursuing a definite personal aim; and he 
thought the Italians unworthy, the French 
incapable, of freedom. He had no scruples; 
religion did not trouble him. In June, 1796, 
he had invaded Bologna, a Papal city, where 
the Senate swore an oath of allegiance to the 
Republic, and trees of Liberty were planted. 
Pius VI. was compelled to buy a truce from 
Bonaparte (June 23, 1796) on heavy condi- 
tions which he was unable to fulfil. Then 



196 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

the young general seized Ancona; but he 
paused on the way to Rome at Tolentino, 
and there made peace. The Pope surrendered 
his claim to Avignon, Bologna, Ferrara, 
Romagna; he gave up manuscripts and 
treasures of art; he was fined many millions. 
His sacrifices availed nothing. Disorders in 
Rome led to a French intervention under 
Berthier in February, 1798. The Roman 
Republic was proclaimed by *' Jews, apostate 
monks, and rebels,'" said Bonaparte after- 
wards. On February 20, Pius VI., escorted 
by Republican soldiers, was made to quit 
the Vatican for a long and painful pilgrimage 
to parts unknown. It ended eighteen months 
later at Valence, in Dauphine, where he died, 
and where his body remained another four 
months without burial. "'It is not strange,'' 
says Macaulay, summing up these events, 
*Hhat in the year 1799 even sagacious observ- 
ers should have thought that, at length, the 
hour of the Church of Rome had come." 

Section II 

THE FORTUNES OF PIUS VII. (1800-1815) 

Certainly it was, in Biblical language, the 
*' consummation of the age." But this had 
been preparing since America declared its 



FORTUNES OF PIUS VII. 197 

independence in 1776; and the Catholic 
Restoration was heralded by singular tokens. 
When France, Spain, and the United States 
combined in 1778 against England, the Penal 
Laws were straightway relaxed. Irish and 
English Catholics, as it was said, saw the day 
dawn across the Atlantic. Their colleges 
abroad were dissolved by the French Rev- 
olution; and Pitt associated himself with 
Burke in founding a seminary for priests at 
Maynooth. Burke, religious and conser- 
vative by temper, proclaimed with match- 
less eloquence the principles of a society in 
which were to be united liberty and authority 
under the true Law of Nature. The prophet 
of what has been called since that time 
Ultramontanism, a Savoyard by birth, a 
Frenchman by mastery of the language, 
Count de Maistre, was already committing 
to print views and opinions which would 
transform the Gallican clergy to apostles 
of the Vatican. A marvellous prose-poet, 
traveller in American wilds, mystic and 
politician at once, Chateaubriand, was medi- 
tating on the ''genius of Christianity." And 
O'Connell and Lamennais were born, and 
with them Cavour's formula, "A Free Church 
in a Free State." 

The Directory might imprison or deport 



198 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

the clergy; but thousands of parishes in 
France now had their Mass and their priests 
as of old, with a devotion intensified by all 
that, during ten years of glorious sufferings, 
had endeared the pastor to his flock. Free- 
dom, so long the enemy of religion, had 
become its friend. A vicious prelacy could 
not exist in days of persecution. The Church 
lands were gone; monasteries, in ruins or 
converted to secular uses, were memories of 
a past remote by comparison with Repub- 
lican atrocities of yesterday. Nothing was 
more evident than that the French Church 
would revive; that the people desired it; and 
that if it could preach and teach freely, it 
would exercise a power such as it had never 
possessed under the Crown. Would any 
Government, however framed and named, 
allow it such liberty while the inveterate 
tradition of Regalism held sway at Paris? 
The First Consul replied by inventing the 
Concordat of 1802. 

Napoleon's reign in France lasted under 
the titles of Consul and Emperor about 
fifteen years. It restored the monarchy of 
Louis XIV. as designed by Jlichelieu, with- 
out nobles or intermediate self-sustaining 
bodies of any kind. Richelieu, Bonaparte, 
the Revolution, "one and indivisible," agree 



FORTUNES OF PIUS VII. 199 

that all agencies in Church and State shall 
take their orders from a minister, and the 
minister from the Chief of the executive 
power. The Girondists attempted a Federal 
system and were guillotined in consequence. 
Robespierre, perhaps we should say Carnot, 
interpreted the principles correctly which 
have always inspired French statesmen; 
and no doubt it was Bonaparte's unrivalled 
feeling for reality that, by giving these 
principles an application in detail at once 
striking and successful, convinced the nation 
of his right to govern them. The French de- 
sire to be much "administered"; they adore 
a strong man; and their idea of strength is 
to interfere decisively in another man's 
business. Philosophers recognize the mili- 
tary type as at all times dominating French 
history; and Napoleon, who was constructing 
a barrack for his twenty-five millions of 
subjects, did not refuse them a chapel within 
the enclosure. Its chaplain was to be the 
Pope, receiving a salary, bound by the 
Articles of 1682, resident in Paris or Avignon. 
Such is the whole purpose of the Concordat, 
which its creator would never look upon as a 
treaty between equal contracting parties; 
it merely regulated that department of the 
State known as the Catholic Church. "I 



200 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

regard religion/' he said in 1806, "not as the 
mystery of the Incarnation, but as the secret 
of social order." He had acted on this view 
in Egypt; he was now meaning to apply it 
in France. 

And so he turned to Pius YLI., lately elected 
at Venice, but in his sympathies not Austrian, 
who had entered Rome, July 3, 1800. In 
June, the battle of Marengo had given 
Italy once more to the French. Bonaparte 
sent a sketch of the future agreement, as he 
conceived of it, to the Pope on June 25, and 
a remarkable outline it is. The Constitu- 
tional Church was to disappear; the number 
of bishoprics must be reduced, and many 
emigrant bishops deprived; the clergy would 
have adequate but not luxurious stipends; 
the Pope might freely exercise spiritual 
jurisdiction over the Gallican Church, and 
he alone should give its prelates canonical 
institution, but the State was to nominate 
them. Finally, the First Consul would 
reinstate the Pope in all his dominions. 

It was a tempting offer, and almost a 
miracle in the light of previous events. The 
Revolution had done its utmost to destroy 
Catholicism; it was now prepared to recog- 
nize and establish the ancient Church not 
on a Gallican but on a Papal foundation. 



FORTUNES OF PIUS VII. 201 

What was the alternative? Madame de 
Stael (a woman of rare genius and insight, 
but Napoleon's enemy) tells us that sincere 
Catholics would have been well content with 
an American system, which she calls "tolera- 
tion/' The American Constitution does not 
"tolerate" religion; it respects conscience 
and leaves religious associations to manage 
their own affairs. But she would probably 
have in view such a law as that of September 
29, 1795, by which the French Government 
decreed separation of Church and State with 
consequent freedom of worship. This plan 
had never been carried through. In all 
European countries except Holland free 
religious association was a thing unknown 
and not imderstood. The Cardinals of the 
Roman Curia had been accustomed for 
centuries to see religion either protected or 
persecuted by the State; and these appeared 
still to be the alternatives under an absolute 
ruler like Bonaparte. No doubt they were. 
Could the Holy Father, then, ask the much- 
tried French Catholics, who were now begin- 
ning to breathe freely, that they should 
forego manifest advantages, submit to fresh 
tribulations, and withstand the conqueror at 
the moment when he was holding out to them 
an' olive branch? Pius VII. was neither a 



202 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

Hildebrand nor an Innocent III. He was 
a gentle and most engaging Benedictine 
monk, of Hildebrand's monastery at St. 
Paul's outside Rome, but cast in another 
mould. On the ordinary laws of prudence, 
in the interest of the Church, he could not 
but accept the first Consul's invitation. 
Accordingly, he sent his Secretary of State, 
Cardinal Consalvi, to Paris. 

Consalvi, by far the ablest man associated 
with Vatican memories in the last century, 
until Leo XIII. rose to be "Lumen in coelo," 
was by birth Roman, by descent Pisan. He 
had suffered with Pius VL, and on the Pope's 
exile was committed for several months to 
the Castle of Sant' Angelo. Secretary of the 
Conclave in Venice, he was now launched on 
the career of danger and vicissitude to which 
all were exposed who had dealings with 
Bonaparte. But the Pisan proved a match 
for the Corsican, except that he could not 
fall back on thirty legions, f Arriving in Paris, 
June 20, 1801, he was graciously received at 
the Tuileries by Napoleon amid his court as in 
a theatre. Negotiations went on with Bernier, 
Joseph Bonaparte, and the First Consul him- 
self, whose method, made as it was of prom- 
ises, threatenings, and deceit, no statesman 
of the Renaissance could have bettered.^ 



FORTUNES OF PIUS VII. 203 

The dramatic story of one project torn 
up by Napoleon and flung in the fire, of a 
false copy substituted for the true, and 
discovered only at the last moment, must 
be read in Consalvi's memoirs. On July 15, 
1801, the document was at length signed 
which bound the Church by links of steel 
and gold to every French Government down 
to the year 1905. On Easter Day, 1802, 
this manage de convenance, as it was wittily 
called, found solemn expression at the High 
Mass in Notre Dame, attended by the Con- 
suls with military pomp. Chateaubriand's 
dazzling rhetoric in his "Genius of Chris- 
tianity'' hailed it with an epithalamium 
unequalled for magnificence and pathos in 
any French prose later than Bossuet. Con- 
salvi had won a diplomatic victory. The 
First Consul had overcome resistance from 
his ministers and generals, from freethink- 
ers. Liberals, and the constitutional clergy. 
Pius \^I. never forgot, in all his subsequent 
misfortunes, this "saving act of Christian 
heroism," on the part of Napoleon. To 
speak as the French love to do, "the Revo- 
lution had gone to Mass." Louis XVIII. 
and the emigrants protested; but the land 
had religious peace. 

What, then, was the Concordat? In 



204 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

substance, it renewed that of 1516 with 
Francis I. Government appointed, Rome 
instituted the bishops of France. But in- 
stead of a propertied Church there were 
salaried oflScials. The various rights of 
patronage ceased; and every bishop named 
the cures in his diocese, with their assistants 
during pleasure, all paid rather scantily 
from the State exchequer. Religious orders 
were not mentioned; they had no legal 
existence. Other worships, Protestant and 
Hebrew, were put on a similar establishment 
by decrees with which this Concordat was 
not implicated. But, on the one hand, Bon- 
aparte required from Pius VII. an act of 
power without precedent; on the other he 
added such an epilogue to the paper he had 
signed as to transform its character. The 
act which Pius VII. executed on compulsion 
was to break up the old French hierarchy, 
dating in popular belief from companions of 
the Apostles, to deprive thirty-seven emi- 
grant bishops who would not resign, to 
persuade many others, and to accept the 
Government plan of a new ecclesiastical 
France. Most of the former bishops yielded 
gracefully. But for some years a ''Petite 
Eglise" stood out against Rome. 

The abolition and reconstitution of the 



FORTUNES OF PIUS VII. 205 

GalHcan Church by the Pope was, although 
Bonaparte did not perceive it, the end of 
GaUicanism, It was the Fourth of August 
over again. For on that night privileges 
were swept away and only the supreme 
authority was left. Napoleon, therefore, is 
the chief precursor of the Vatican Council, 
and of its decree which recognizes in the Pope 
ordinary jurisdiction over every bishop in 
Christendom. But this logic was hidden 
from his eyes, and he proceeded to tack on 
to the Concordat his ''Organic Articles/' 
which may be shortly described as French 
Acts of Praemunire, making the entrance and 
publication of Papal documents to depend on 
a Government placet, forbidding recourse of 
the bishops to Rome, and compelling the 
clergy to subscribe the Declaration of 1682. 

All this meant more than the old servitude, 
especially as the Articles forbade every 
Church establishment except the seminaries 
of the bishops. It reduced that which had 
been an estate of the realm to a department 
like the University. It divided the bishops 
from the Holy See and the clergy from the 
people. A system no less illogical than des- 
potic, it sowed the seeds of religious war by 
creating a perpetual antagonism between the 
head of the Government and the Roman 



206 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

Curia. Napoleon had employed Pius VII. 
to get rid of the old Church in its historical 
form, and of the new or constitutional. He 
then wished to make of the Pope a mere 
formal instrument, such as the servile minis- 
ters were who wrote out his decrees. When 
he became Emperor, the sovereign Pontiff 
was brought in triumph to Paris, that the 
scene of Charlemagne's consecration as Em- 
peror of the West might be renewed. It was 
done, — with a significant variation, for Napo- 
leon crowned himseK. At Milan he assumed 
the Iron Crown of Lombardy, setting in mo- 
tion another train of ideas and aspirations. 
For the Italian kingdom was a sign lifted up 
to modern Ghibellines, to those who knew the 
name and projects of Rienzi, to readers of the 
marvellous page where Machiavelli in his 
^'Prince" concludes with an exhortation to 
let the '^Liberator of Italy'' appear. Would 
Milan be his capital when he came.^ The 
Italians worshipped Napoleon, but they be- 
gan to dream of Liberty. 

And so Pius VII., once more in Rome, was 
a target for the imperial shafts. He could not 
agree to the organic Articles; the Legations 
and other provinces of the Holy See were 
denied him; the new Charlemagne talked of 
Rome as his own city. The crisis arrived 



FORTUNES OF PIUS VII. 207 

with a strong letter of Napoleon's, dated 
February 13, 1806, in which he said, "Your 
Hohness is Sovereign in Rome, but I am the 
Roman Emperor." Pius VII. must break off 
diplomatic relations with the enemies of 
France, expel their subjects, and close his 
ports to them. He refused, Consalvi retired, 
and Napoleon made up his mind to incorpo- 
rate the capital of Catholicism with his grow- 
ing Empire. On February 2, 1808, General 
Miolhs entered by the Porta del Popolo. He 
occupied the city until June 10, 1809, when 
the Papal arms were torn down from the 
Castle of St. Angelo, and the tricolour was 
hoisted. By a decree at Schonbrunn the 
victorious Emperor had united the Pope's 
territories to his own dominions. The Pope 
solemnly excommunicated him on that very 
day. Pius would not abdicate, and on July 6 
he was taken off to Florence. His captivity 
lasted nearly five years. 

This inevitable outcome of Napoleon's 
policy was a profound mistake. Had he 
been opposed by an Innocent III., public 
opinion might have condoned his forcible acts, 
though never his brutality. But Pius VII. 
was an angel of peace, not intriguing and 
not resisting, who still with patient firmness 
held the ground of principle when other 



208 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

sovereigns lay in the dust before this Corsican 
Attila. And Attila was resolved on a divorce 
that he might found a dynasty; but the 
Pope his prisoner would not break a mar- 
riage that, to the Pope's knowledge, was 
valid. Furthermore, the demi-god, which 
Napoleon now was in his own esteem, de- 
manded from all future pontiffs an oath of 
allegiance to the French Emperor. 

While he kept the defenceless old man in a 
lonely prison at Savona, he drove the Cardi- 
nals together at Paris. He degraded those 
who would not attend his wedding with 
Marie Louise; and, when the Pope declined 
to institute his bishops, called a Council in 
Notre Dame, which was to act without and 
contrary to Papal authority. The Council 
met, trembled, but would not obey (June 17- 
August 5, 1811). Under extreme pressure, 
it asked the Pope to sanction the institution 
of bishops by the archbishop in an emergency, 
and he did so. Before starting for Moscow, 
the Caliph (as Napoleon was fond of describ- 
ing himself) ordered that Pius should be taken 
to Fontainebleau, there to await the victor's 
return. When that happened, the Papacy 
was to be transferred to Paris, the spiritual 
to be separated from the temporal power, and, 
said Napoleon in the same breath, *^I would 



FORTUNES OF PIUS VII. 209 

have governed the world both of poHtics and 
religion/' His dream vanished amid the 
snows of Russia; it dropped with his sol- 
diers' muskets on that wintry march, and 
sank in the ice-drifts of the Beresina. 
• But he would not let his victim go free. 
The Pope lingered at Fontainebleau, half 
dead and with enfeebled mind, from June 16, 
1812, until the Emperor suddenly came 
thither, on January 18 of next year, to en- 
force fresh demands. The beaten man was 
playing for desperate stakes. Without help 
or advice on which he could rely, the Pope 
yielded so far as to sign a new Concordat, giv- 
ing up his right of institution. The effort 
almost deprived him of reason, and on March 
24 he withdrew his signature, extorted thus 
by sheer violence after a long imprisonment. 
It was clear to all the world that constraint 
alone had wrung from the Holy Father a 
momentary adhesion to the Emperor's wishes. 
The Concordat was published and had force 
of law, during the brief period now remaining 
before Napoleon himself abdicated under the 
same roof at Fontainebleau. 

By that date the Pope was taken back to 
Savona, which he left again on March 19, 
1814, a few days previous to the decision 
made at Dampierre by the Allies to advance 



210 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

on Paris. May 24 saw the Apostolic prisoner 
free, and triumphantly returning to his capi- 
tal, where Spanish and Sardinian sovereigns 
and Marie Louise of Etruria waited for him. 
During the Hundred Days he retired before 
Murat to Genoa; but on June 17, 1815, he 
made his fourth and last entrance into Rome. 
Two days afterwards the Congress of Vienna 
resolved that St. Peter's successor should 
have restored to him not only the Patri- 
mony, but the Marches, the Legations, 
Beneventum and Pontecorvo. This extraor- 
dinary event was due to Consalvi, who 
had proved himself equal to the assembled 
diplomatists of Europe, as he had previously 
withstood Napoleon to his face. 

The fallen Emperor set out on his voyage 
to St. Helena in the British vessel ''Northum- 
berland," on August 10, 1815. He died at 
Longwood, May 5, 1821; and the Pope, 
whom he had so deeply injured, lamented him 
with tears. Manzoni chanted his requiem 
in the musical and sympathetic ode which 
stirred Italian hearts to their deepest. After 
all, the genius of Napoleon was native in its 
origin to Florence; and they might claim the 
conqueror and lawgiver of Europe as their 
kith and kin. 



CHAPTER VII 

from waterloo to the fall of rome 
(1815-1870. de maistre, "on the 
pope"; neilsen, "papacy in xixth 
century," ii.) 

The Holy Alliance, Metternich, the Carbo- 
nari, the Sanfedisti, the Ordinances and the 
Three Days of July, Lamennais, the ''Affairs 
of Rome," Thiers and Guizot, the ''Year of 
Revolutions" — who is there now living that 
has a clear remembrance of these things and 
the period to v/hich they belong.^ They are 
gone "with the years beyond the Flood." 
Reader, can you make an effort of good- 
will and imagination, to recall for one brief 
moment this interlude between the defeat of 
Napoleon at Waterloo and the rise of Italy 
to independence.^ It has ended in the setting 
up of a new and Protestant German Em- 
pire on the ruins of that which for a thou- 
sand years had professed to be Holy and 
Roman. It has brought in the reign of 
democracy acknowledged and making laws 
in all Parliaments. From the Congress of 
Vienna to the Council of the Vatican is, it 

211 



212 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

would now appear, but an episode, at the 
close of which, and on the fall of Rome, that 
spirit, imprisoned rather than set free in the 
Declaration of 1789, was to come into pos- 
session of the world-powers, and to dictate 
the programme of history. 
I Rome is, in the era which we have yet to 
sum up and consider, strangely symbolical. 
The European movement centres round it. 
We may fruitfully compare the Pope's situa- 
tion to that of St. Gregory the Great, between 
a dying Empire which he would have gladly 
defended, and the onset of barbarian tribes. 
St. Gregory was loyal and despairing — we see 
it in his letters, we hear it in his discourses to 
the Roman people. In the nineteenth century 
the Pope's encyclical epistles are great la- 
ments, uttered as the ancient order of things 
is breaking up and is falling into the gulf of 
oblivion. They are full of pathos, while they 
provoke the aspiring Liberal to scorn them 
as impotent, and the revolutionary to con- 
tinue his successful assault on institutions 
which he hates, but has not altogether 
destroyed. Yet on a large review those allo- 
cutions will be found to have pleaded the 
cause of spiritual freedom. Their opposition 
to Csesar has made for progress. And if we 
discern, as we ought, the severe classic 



TO THE FALL OF ROME 213 

features of Napoleon behind every enactment 
that strikes at the claim to voluntary associa- 
tion with which religion is connected, we shall 
come to understand that there is a democ- 
racy whose rights the Vatican watches over. 
The Pope can never be a Regalist; the abso- 
lute State will always persecute him. 

For lack of spiritual insight Napoleon, 
though so amazing a man of genius, had 
made war on nationality in England, Spain 
and Russia; on religion in all his dominions; 
and on freedom everywhere. The nations 
had risen and had pulled down the Colossus. 
But when the Allies were settling Europe at 
Vienna, while professing to defend religion, 
they conspired against liberty, and they 
trampled on national feelings. Especially did 
they cut and carve the Italian peninsula, as 
though it were nothing better than the corpse 
of antiquity. But nations were no longer 
minded to be the playthings of dynasties, old 
or new. Ireland, Poland, Greece, Belgium, 
uttered their claim for recognition as loudly 
as Spain or Germany, flushed with pride after 
a war of Liberation. The principles of '89 
had been written in an abstract dialect; but 
the nations were stubborn reaKties, each 
determined to live its own life. 
' Again, the movement in literature called 



214 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

Romanticism favoured every attempt which 
revived home memories, gave new charm to 
the ancient language and customs of the 
race, and protected smaller communities from 
absorption in a colourless civilization. We 
feel the oncoming of this great change in 
Chateaubriand's writings, in Scott, Byron, 
and above all in Goethe, from whom these 
poets and story-tellers learnt much of their 
craft. And how should Italy not be touched 
by the same influence.^ But Austria held 
Lombardy and Venetia in an iron clasp. 
Naples had been given back to the Bourbons. 
Even Consalvi, more of a politician than a 
poet, failed to enter into the significance of 
Romanticism, and kept up the French system 
of government in the Papal States. That 
Italy must be developed on the sound and 
splendid traditions which were still its own, 
did not occur to this otherwise clear-eyed 
ruler of men. Thus, after 1815, the "Risorgi- 
mento'' — a word as inspiring as the Renais- 
sance three centuries earlier — seemed to 
portend rebellion from the Alps to Palermo. 
' Metternich, called by those whom he kept 
down Mitternacht, or the Prince of Darkness, 
had come into power when the French Em- 
pire was at its height. Without more scruples 
than Kaunitz, but made by circumstance 



TO THE FALL OF ROME 215 

the champion of Christendom, he first aUied 
the Austrian monarchy with Napoleon by 
the iniquitous marriage that sacrificed Marie 
Louise, and then declared against him in 
time for the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig 
(October 16-18, 1813). During the next 
thirty-five years Metternich stood as the 
Reaction incarnate before Europe. In con- 
junction with Alexander of Russia, a senti- 
mental dreamer, and with lesser royal per- 
sonages, he formed the Holy Alliance, which 
was intended to support absolute govern- 
ments by appealing to religion and patriotism. 
But he dreaded Alexander as capable of ex- 
ploiting the Jacobin movement, still making 
itself felt everywhere, to his own advantage. 
For the Tsar posed as the "Liberator" of 
Europe. France and Italy were the smok- 
ing furnaces of revolution always. The 
Bourbons could set up old forms again, but 
to give them life was impossible. A Charter 
"conceded" by grace of the Crown, English 
constitutional peculiarities transplanted to 
Paris, the Concordat of 1516 brought out 
of its tomb, but ministers like Fouche and 
Talleyrand retained — the sum of these things 
was confusion. As Chateaubriand wrote, 
"Religion, ideas, interest, language, earth 
and heaven, all were different for the People 



216 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

and the King, separated by twenty-five 
years which were equivalent to centuries/* 
Russia, so Metternich beheved, was provok- 
ing the Liberals in Latin countries to secret 
confederacy and open revolt. The rising in 
Naples of 1820 enabled him, once for all, 
to get from Alexander an approval of the 
Austrian system, which reduced Italy to a 
name on the map, and made its potentates, 
including the Holy See, subject to Vienna. 

Thus, by methods of repression, as Napo- 
leon by setting on his brows the Iron Crown, 
Metternich awoke in many minds, and 
especially among the youth growing to man- 
hood, a deep yearning for the free united 
Italy to be restored, which had once been 
mistress of the world. A boy-poet, Leopardi, 
gave piercing expression to these dangerous 
thoughts. In the Two Sicilies, a kind of 
political camorra sprang up, whose members, 
bound by secret oaths and advocates of regi- 
cide doctrines, called themselves Carbonari, 
charcoal-burners. The Papal Government, 
transformed by two French occupations, was 
neither old nor new. Chateaubriand says 
brilliantly that in Rome ''the French left 
their principles behind them''; it would be 
more exact to observe that they had created 
a problem and left its solution to others. 



TO THE FALL OF ROME 217 

Italians, and among them the Holy Father's 
subjects, were ambitious of a share in the 
world's progress, material and industrial 
no less than political. But the famous 
question demanded a reply, "How was the 
government to be carried on?" Nepotism, 
which gave the Pope trusty ministers, was 
dead long ago. The Cardinals had lost their 
wealth, and could not, as in times past, 
spare the people from heavy burdens of 
taxation. Clerics alone occupied important 
posts and administered the offices of State. 
Moreover, on the Napoleonic system, which 
Consalvi did not alter, a centralized rule 
swept away local customs and privileges, 
dear to these old cities, which in their fierce 
self-idolatry were as Greek as Thebes or 
Megara had been. 

When Pius VII. died Consalvi's reign was 
over. Leo XII. governed with a reformer's 
zeal and severity. But the Romans, it is 
said, did not like him at all; his Vigil- 
ance Committee was hated; and Cardinal 
Rivarola's action in putting down the Car- 
bonari at Ravenna (1825) excited wide- 
spread indignation. A veiled civil war is 
the only description that will express the 
condition of Italy and the Papal States 
during the years from 1820 to 1848. Amid 



218 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

such a conflict of ideas and parties reform 
could be hardly attempted, nor was it 
likely to succeed. Leo XII. was not opposed 
to the Charter in France nor unwilling to 
recognize that the world had entered on 
fresh paths. He said to the remarkable 
man whom we have quoted above, and whose 
memoirs give a lively picture of the times, 
^'The Catholic Church has prospered in 
the midst of republics as in the bosom of 
monarchies; it has made immense progress 
in the United States; it reigns alone in 
Spanish America." Consalvi had advised 
Leo to treat directly with insurgent peoples 
across the Atlantic, disregarding Spain's 
pretensions, and the Holy See did so, follow- 
ing its rule of setting religious interests before 
old alliances. But Chateaubriand held that 
the Papal Government needed young blood, 
and instruments not yet created. Cardinals 
born previous to 1789 were by temper and 
experience strengthened in their resistance 
to ideas that had been bathed in blood. 
Moreover, Rome could not boast of the 
resources that were necessary to carry through 
an extensive programme. It was clear to 
observers that events in the great world 
outside would determine the future of the 
Holy See. 



TO THE FALL OF ROME 219 

These events were not slow in coming. 
The Restoration, kept afloat by Louis XVIIL, 
a fatigued Voltarian, suflfered shipwreck 
under his light-minded brother Charles X. 
It vexed earnest Catholics by a sort of feeble 
Gallicanism, irritated Liberals, led to the 
definite rise of the "anti-clerical," who ever 
since has made war on Jesuits, and gave 
itself over to the ''ignorant and visionary." 
Polignac, who, by advising the ordinances of 
July, 1830, against the liberty of the press, 
brought the Bourbon monarchy to the 
ground. Louis Philippe, son of ''Egalite" 
and citizen-king, took its place. The "Three 
Days of July" were a victory for Liberal ideas 
but not a defeat for the Church. WTiy not? 
Because, answers M. Faguet, in 1830 the 
Constitution took away from Government 
its monopoly of education (insisted upon 
by Charles X. in 1828), and so gave to 
Catholics, above all to religious orders, a 
freedom which would have made them 
independent. This observation is profoundly 
just. The struggle in modern times between 
Christian and unchristian theories (which 
decides every other) must be fought out 
in the schools. 

But that victory, so far as gained, was due 
ta a man of rare genius, a Breton, a priest. 



220 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

and a journalist whose name was Lamennais. 
He on the Cathohc side, as Lafayette on the 
Liberal, had struck for freedom. Lamennais 
was neither a republican nor a revolutionist. 
To him religion meant everything he held 
dear. He longed that the Catholic Church 
should have power as it has authority, but 
power by methods apostolic and proper to 
itself, not by coercion from without but by 
persuasion of the candid soul. He had pub- 
lished in 1819 his "'Essay on Indifference in 
Matters of Religion,'" on the appearance of 
which Frayssinous, the Gallican bishop, 
exclaimed, ''It is a book to awaken the dead.'' 
It electrified the reading world in France by 
its sombre, incisive eloquence. Its author 
was hailed as the Catholic Rousseau; and 
like his Genevan prototype he showed him- 
seK almost morbidly sensitive to criticism. 
Leo XII. welcomed him at the Vatican, set 
up the French apologist's portrait in his 
private room, and as it would seem, created 
him cardinal ''in petto^^; but he was not al- 
lowed by the French Government to announce 
his elevation. 

On April 20, 1826, the extraordinary 
sight was seen of a priest charged before 
the magistrates in Paris by the public 
prosecutor, under a Catholic ministry, with 



TO THE FALL OF ROME 221 

having, by a recent pamphlet, '^elffaced the 
boundaries which separate spiritual from 
temporal power; proclaimed the supremacy 
and infallibility of the Pope; and admitted 
in the Roman Pontiff the right of deposing 
princes and releasing their subjects from the 
oath of fealty." The priest was the Abbe 
de Lamennais. He refused the Court's juris- 
diction; reiterated the statements of which 
he was accused; and was fined thirty francs 
— say thirty pieces of silver. Various pre- 
lates sent up loyal addresses to the throne. 
Lamennais reminded them scornfully that 
^' there was in the world a person named the 
Pope." So low had Gallicanism fallen! The 
vision of a Catholic democracy dawned on 
him, as he contemplated teland rising with 
O'Connell and forcing an ahen Protestant 
Parliament to grant emancipation. Another 
country, Belgium, free from the Gallican 
taint, had begun its fight for independence 
and the old creed which it was speedily to 
win. But neither Belgians nor Irish Catholics 
suffered from ''the terrible disease called 
Royahsm." 

Such were the sentiments that moved 
Lamennais to answer the ordinances of 1828 
by his work ''On the Progress of the Revo- 
lution and the War against the Church," 



222 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

in February, 1829. It insisted as a right 
on liberty of the press, of education, of 
conscience. The stir which it created was 
indescribably great. Its author had crossed 
the gulf opened in 1790 between Catholicism 
and the Revolution. The Days of July 
followed, and liberty was promised in the 
Charter, but the promise was broken without 
delay. Then Lamennais founded L'Avenir 
to propagate his doctrine, and L'Agence 
Catholique to denounce the assaults of Govern- 
ment officials on religious freedom. Trials, 
condemnations, could not stop the movement. 
Ministers were alarmed, bishops charged 
against VAvenir. In an unlucky moment 
three '^pilgrims of liberty'' made their way 
to Rome — Lamennais, Lacordaire, Montalem- 
bert. They would not be satisfied until 
Gregory XVI. had pronounced judgment on 
their politico-religious views. 

He did so in the Encyclical ^'Mirari Vos" 
(August 15, 1832). His judgment was a 
condemnation. The pilgrims received word 
of it at Munich and submitted. It has been 
well said that their appeal to Rome was ''the 
first act in that long agony of Gallicanism 
which ended with the Vatican Council/' As 
regards UAvenir^ this is what Montalembert 
wrote long afterwards: ''To new and reason- 



TO THE FALL OF ROME 223 

able ideas, honest in themselves, which have 
for the last twenty years been the daily bread 
of Catholic polemics, we had been foolish 
enough to add extreme and rash theories, and 
to defend both by means of an absolute logic 
such as will be sure to ruin, if it does not dis- 
honour, every cause." 

We may illustrate these words from the 
actual situation. Lamennais had committed 
himself to principles which betrayed un- 
doubted tendencies towards anarchism; and 
this at a moment when Europe was shaken by 
a political earthquake. His reasoning was as 
inexorable as his temperament; and the conse- 
quences might have been disastrous wherever 
Catholics dwelt. Risings in Belgium and 
Poland had taken place after the Revolution 
of July. Two months of interregnum fol- 
lowed the death of Pius VIII. on the last 
day of November, 1830. A monk of Camal- 
doli was elected Pope at Candlemas, 1831; 
and two days later Bologna revolted, put the 
Cardinal Legate in prison, and set up a gov- 
ernment animated by Carbonari principles. 
The Austrian troops, hardly waiting for leave 
from Rome, entered the Legations. France 
sent a detachment to Ancona. The rebels 
meanwhile had denounced the Pope's tem- 
I>oral power as a usurpation. Was this a time 



224 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

solemnly to approve of a programme which 
asserted popular sovereignty in the crudest 
form, and preached the sacred duty of resist- 
ance to rulers without reserve or limits, as in 
the columns of VAvenir had been repeatedly 
done? Gregory XVI., in affirming the 
traditional principles of obedience and 
authority, had a strong case; nor was it 
difficult to show that the Catholic Church 
had always quoted the language of St. Paul 
in reference to "the powers that be.'' 

A further observation is to the purpose. 
The work "'De Regimine Principum," as- 
cribed to St. Thomas Aquinas, and the 
writings of Suarez on political theories, 
may be taken as representing another aspect 
of the Catholic doctrine, in which an "es- 
sential'' democracy, liberty, and right of 
self-defence are maintained. These comple- 
mentary views require to be fully con- 
sidered, if we would know what is the 
orthodox tradition as a whole. But it would 
be too much to expect that the sovereign 
Pontiff should, on a practical issue and in 
moments of crisis, defeat his own action by 
an academic balancing of phrases when the 
time calls for guidance, and social interests 
are at stake. Gregory XVI. spoke as the 
Church's governor; while Lamennais would 



TO THE FALL OF ROME 225 

have persuaded him to throw in his lot with 
French democracy, mostly unbelieving, and 
already moving towards anarchical Utopias. 

By this date of 1832 the fiery Breton had 
himself become an enemy of the whole social 
order. He was meditating and had begun 
to write "The Words of a Believer" which, 
in tones and colours borrowed from the 
Apocalypse, portended a third Revolution. 
The blood-stained "Days of June" in 1848, 
with all their violence and atrocity, cannot be 
wholly dissociated from the passions thus 
excited. They would never have come to pass 
had Pope Gregory's Encyclical been obeyed. 
Lamennais went his way, from one excess of 
doctrine to another. He tasted the bitterness 
of prison at Sainte Pelagic; his last years 
vrere spent in poverty and isolation; and 
he lies in a nameless tomb at Pere la Chaise. 
"Nothing must mark my grave," said the 
dying man. As Savonarola was the martyr 
of the Renaissance, so Lamennais was the 
victim of the Revolution. "Sunt lacrymse 
rerum!" 

Although reforms had been urged upon 
Gregory XVI. by Metternich and the Powers 
(May 21, 1831), his reign passed without 
undertaking any change. Lamennais, who 
saw the future in his dreams, prophesied that 



226 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

a beginning would be made "in the next 
pontificate/' Italy was once more producing 
notable if not great men. In 1826 the 
"Promessi Sposi" — a romance after Scott, 
historical and patriotic — by the Lombard 
Manzoni appeared. In 1830 the Genoese 
Mazzini transformed the earlier Carbonari 
movement to "young Italy/' insurgent, 
republican, idealist. The "mysterious and 
terrible conspirator" lay under sentence of 
death from his native Government until 
1866. Among the devout adherents of the 
Papacy another conception ruled. They de- 
sired to set the Holy Father in his mediaeval 
throne, to federate the Italian States under 
him as suzerain, and thus to restore the civil 
no less than the intellectual primacy which 
they claimed for the Peninsula. 

These were the "new Guelfs," led by 
Gioberti, of Turin, and Rosmini, of Rovereto, 
philosophic priests and admirable writers. 
Cesare Balbo, the historian, belonged to their 
school; and Austria was their enemy. But so 
was France. The battle between Galileans 
and Ul tramontanes went on in Paris; with 
denial of free education, though promised by 
the Charter; with episodes like the anti- 
Jesuit lectures of Quinet and Michelet, which 
prompted Guizot to demand in 1845 at Rome 



POPE PIUS IX. 227 

that the Society in France should be dissolved. 
It is matter of history that the new Guelf s 
were not friendly to the Jesuits; but they 
believed in freedom. Gregory XVI. had no 
choice but to yield; and Pellegrino Rossi, 
June 23, 1845, announced to his Government 
that the French Jesuit province would be 
abolished. An unsuccessful rising of Mazzini- 
ans in the Legations led to the execution of 
seven conspirators by Cardinal Vannicelli's 
orders. At Rimini the insurrection failed 
likewise; but Farini put forth a manifesto 
which renewed the demands of the Great 
Powers in 1831, and claimed an amnesty 
for political offences. Nearly two thousand 
Papal subjects, it is said, were "in exile, 
proscribed, or under prosecution" when 
Gregory XVI. died. May 31, 1846. 



Section II 

THE LOUIS XVI. OF THE PAPACY (1846-1870) 

Then the change came which Lamennais 
foresaw. Pius IX. was elected. He opened 
the prison-doors, and men cried to one 
another that at last the Papa Angelico had 
appeared, in whose reign all things were to 
Be made new. Handsome, winning, devout, 



228 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

kind-hearted, of large, benevolent designs, 
Giovanni Maria Mastai took the Italians 
captive at once. He was called in Vienna 
disdainfully a "reforming pontiff"; and 
the amnesty provoked Metternich to declare 
that it invited robbers to set the house on 
fire. But the Pope was without strong 
advisers, and he had no definite policy. To 
put himself at the head of an Italian League 
was not in his thoughts. The Austrian 
Chancellor knew that Europe slept on a vol- 
cano; Cesare Balbo warned the Holy Father 
not to trust in popular manifestations. They 
continued for many months; a council of 
ministers (July 12, 1847) seemed to promise 
constitutional government; and in the Forum 
was heard Sterbini's patriotic chant, the 
Roman Marseillaise. Not Pius IX. but 
Rienzi; nor yet the new Guelfs, but Mazzini 
and young Italy, inspired the captains who 
now led this agitation. Metternich sent 
Austrian troops into Ferrara. The Pope 
granted a representative assembly, the Con- 
sulta, with responsible ministers; but Mazzini 
was conquering. 

On January 12, 1848, the long expected 
upheaval of the Continent began with a 
revolution at Palermo. The Roman populace 
shouted, "Down with a clerical ministry/' 



POPE PIUS IX. 229 

Pius IX. granted all he deemed possible. 
Then the French in February drove out Louis 
Philippe. Constitutions were the order of 
the day in Italy, and Charles Albert gave his 
Sardinians the "Statuto" which was destined 
to grow into the law of the whole country 
under Victor Emmanuel. The new Papal 
Statute was published on March 14, 1848. 
It could not hinder the enforced retirement 
of the Jesuits from Rome. Metternich had 
been overthrown and was a fugitive in Eng- 
land. The Piedmontese marched against 
Austria, camped in the plains of Lombardy. 
Detachments of the Papal army, blessed by 
Pius IX., were joining the devout and chival- 
rous Sardinian King, Charles Albert. Would 
the Pope don the harness of JuHus II., 
and help to drive the Barbarians out of 
Venice which they had usurped, from the 
Lombard cities where their rule was de- 
tested? Rosmini, "the most enlightened 
priest in Italy," held the war to be a just 
one; but he deprecated its renewal by Pied- 
mont alone; he drew up a plan for the con- 
federation of Italian States under the Pope; 
and meanwhile he strongly approved of 
the allocution (April 29, 1848) in which 
Pius declined to fight against a Christian 
Power. 



230 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

At Turin confusion reigned; ministries 
rose and fell from one month to another. 
Public voices charged the Vatican with 
deserting the national cause. In Rome a 
decided anti-clerical cabinet was formed by 
Mamiani. The other illustrious priest, Gio- 
berti, who shared with Rosmini fame and 
influence, made a triumphal progress to and 
from the Eternal City during these weeks; 
but he was by now devoted to the attainment 
of "Italia una/' with or without the Pope. 
Rosmini held to his idea of a Federal union. 
Sent by Charles Albert to the Holy Father 
in August, 1848, and promised the Cardinal's 
hat, this high-minded counsellor of modera- 
tion could only look on at the approaching 
catastrophe, due in the main to Italians 
themselves, who would not combine or cease 
their quarrelling while Austria took up arms 
once more. Pellegrino Rossi, named Prime 
Minister by the Pope on September 6, was 
murdered by a set of conspirators on the 
stairs of the Cancellaria, when he was entering 
the hall of Parliament, November 15, 1848. 
The assembly took no notice, and "passed 
to the order of the day." Two days later 
the Quirinal was besieged by a howling mob, 
determined to massacre the Swiss guard and 
take the Pope prisoner. His secretary was 



POPE PIUS IX. 231 

shot by his side when Pius appeared on the 
great balcony. Mazzinianism had conquered 
by the use of the dagger. On November 24 
the Pope in disguise fled to Gaeta and the 
King of Naples. 

In this interval France had undergone the 
agony of a social uprising known as the 
"'Days of June"; the millions in alarm 
chose for their President Louis Bonaparte 
on December 10, 1848. The Austrians over- 
powered Charles Albert at Novara, March 
23 of the succeeding year; within six days 
the Roman Republic was proclaimed from 
the Capitol by Garibaldi, triumvirs were 
appointed, and Mazzini became master of 
Rome. In Gaeta the Pope lingered doubtful 
of his course. Two men strove before him as 
in the arena for their respective poKcies — they 
were Rosmini and Antonelli. But the saintly 
philosopher went back, without his Cardinal's 
hat, to Stresa, defeated. Of his victorious 
opponent Marion Crawford wrote, "Antonelli 
was the best hated man of his day, not only 
in Europe and Italy, but by a large proportion 
of Churchmen. He was one of those strong 
and unscrupulous men who appeared every- 
where in Europe as reactionaries in opposition 
to the great revolution. On a smaller scale 
he is to be classed with Disraeli, Metternich, 



232 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

Cavour, and Bismarck." Named to the 
Sacred College in June, 1847, lie was never 
ordained priest. From now onwards until 
his death, November 6, 1876, he stood at the 
Pope's right hand, unremoved by any com- 
bination of enemies or disasters in the political 
sphere. "He was a fighter and a schemer 
by nature,'' says Crawford again. His de- 
spatches were universally admired, and, with 
an army behind him, Antonelli might have 
done memorable deeds. At no time a Liberal, 
he resolved that Pius IX. should return to 
Rome unfettered by constitutional engage- 
ments. Rosmini warned him that this was 
equivalent to losing the temporal power; 
but he went his way. 

Catholics in France, growing more and more 
Papal, urged upon the Prince President that 
he should despatch an armed expedition 
against the new Roman Republic, which was 
becoming the focus of European disorder. He 
did so. But the motley array under Garibaldi 
fought well; and it was not until July 3, 1849, 
that General Oudinot made his entrance 
into the Eternal City, "when from Janiculan 
heights thundered the cannon of France." 
Garibaldi and his troop escaped by the 
Trastevere, being reserved for greater things. 
But how would the Pope come back to his 



POPE PIUS IX. 233 

capital, of which General Niel presented him 
with the keys at Gaeta? AntonelK decided. 
The Holy Father returned April 12, 1850, as, 
in the witty language of the Romans, Pio 
Nono the Second, to whom the idea of reform 
was a dream in the night that is past. A 
French garrison occupied the city; the Lega- 
tions were held by Austria. Charles Albert, 
abdicating, had gone away to die in Portugal. 
But in this tragic hour the makers of 
Itahan unity were found. A statesman, a 
king, and a freebooter, wrought out this 
drama between them. The statesman was 
Cavour, the king Victor Emmanuel, the free- 
booter Garibaldi. And Piedmont, the Italian 
Macedon, was to accomplish a design to the 
conception of which Dante, Rienzi, Machia- 
velli, Caesar Borgia, Napoleon, Manzoni, 
Gioberti, had in their several ways given form 
and substance. Manzoni, in 1836, had de- 
clared to Montalembert that a united Italy 
under the House of Savoy was the one solu- 
tion. Gioberti, leaving his Guelfism, had 
pointed to the same royal house in expecta- 
tion of its future expansion, and proclaimed 
its leadership. The proverb ran, "Savoy will 
eat up the Italian artichoke, leaf by leaf." 
Gioberti was no great politician. But Cavour, 
who now took Piedmont in hand, united policy 



234 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

with daring, and when he assailed Austria 
next, it would be with the arms of France. 

Yet Cavour made the old Regalist mistake, 
and it cost him dear. For the modern State 
abroad, Henry VIII.'s legislation has a fatal 
charm; but the language employed in repro- 
ducing it is taken from the Declaration of 
the Rights of Man. So it was that Victor 
Emmanuel in 1849 announced his intention 
of putting in force the great principle of 
equality before the law, meaning to abolish 
clerical immunities and monastic institutions, 
and to bring in "civil marriage," — this last 
measure a serious blow at the Church in his 
dominions, where the people had always been 
profoundly Catholic. The author of the new 
projects, Siccardi, was despatched to Pius IX., 
then in exile at Portici; but he could not 
win the Pontiff's assent. Troubles ensued; 
Cardinal Franzoni and the Archbishop of 
Cagliari were thrown into prison; Cavour, 
the henchman of Siccardi, was obliged to 
resign. But he soon became Foreign Minis- 
ter, and these laws were all passed. The 
Pope, on July 26, 1855, uttered the great ex- 
communication against every one concerned 
in them. Between Cavour and the Temporal 
Power it was now a struggle to the death. 
His anti-clerical attitude, however, gave the 



POPE PIUS IX. 235 

Holy See an advantage, and, as will appear 
in due course, led to the violent solution by 
cannon-shot in September, 1870, of the Ro- 
man Question. Cavour professed Liberal sen- 
timents, but he was resolved — they are his 
own words — not to suffer an Ultramontane 
Church to grow up, relying on the people, 
such as he beheld in Ireland or Belgium. 
The traditions of Joseph 11. of Austria had 
been transplanted long ago into Sardinian 
seminaries; and they made of Piedmont an 
enemy whom the Pope soon recognized as 
more dangerous than Mazzini. 

The futile Crimean War gave Cavour his 
chance; he seized it boldly. By agreement 
in January, 1855, Sardinia, which had no 
interest at stake in the Orient, joined the 
allied Western Powers. At the Congress of 
1856, held in Paris, the Piedmontese min- 
ister demanded that Austria should withdraw 
from the Legations and a lay Government 
rule them in the Pope's name. Lord Claren- 
don, the English envoy, used strong language 
in condemnation of the Vatican, to which 
Antonelli replied. The Emperor of the 
French wavered, now and always, between a 
policy inspired by his Catholic adherents, 
and a policy of advance which was called for 
by the Liberals all over Europe. His letter 



236 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

in 1849 to Edgar Ney, requiring the Holy 
Father to grant a lay administration, was an 
unredeemed pledge. In 1857 Pius IX. made 
the last Papal progress through his northern 
states. He was kindly received, but did not 
mention the word reform. Antonelli had no 
programme; he waited simply on Providence. 
A Roman conspirator and exile, Orsini, 
brought the situation to a crisis on January 
14, 1858, by attempting the life of Napoleon 
III. in the open day as he was driving to the 
opera. Condemned to death, Orsini ad- 
dressed the Emperor in an historic letter on 
February 11, pleading for the liberation of 
Italy. Cavour turned the whole incident 
adroitly against Rome; he met Napoleon 
secretly at Plombieres, July 20, 1858; and a 
kingdom of twelve millions, from the Alps to 
the Adriatic, was designed under the house of 
Savoy. War was in immediate prospect. 
The Temporal Power had been supported by 
a truce between the two empires on whose 
armed occupation Antonelli relied. If they 
fought, and Austria were beaten, the Pope's 
richest provinces would be lost, a new Lom- 
bard Kingdom set up not far from the gates of 
Rome. Now then a French army landed at 
Genoa in May, 1859. The victory of Magenta 
followed, and on June 11 the Austrian troops 



POPE PIUS IX. 237 

left Bologna. "It was the spark which set 
all Italy ablaze." The Legations declared for 
Victor Emmanuel; a revolt at Perugia was 
quelled, not without bloodshed; the Peace 
of Villa Franca satisfied neither French 
Liberals nor Italian patriots; and Cavour 
resigned. Farini constructed the "'interim" 
State of Emilia. 

Still halting between two policies, Napoleon 
talked of an Italian Federation with Pius IX. 
for its president. The Pope declined; French 
Catholics were enraged with a Government 
that wanted to despoil the Holy See; and 
to no Congress would a Papal representative 
be accredited unless the former boundaries 
of its dominions were guaranteed. This was 
the celebrated ""Non possumus." An En- 
cyclical letter in January, 1860, rejected the 
Emperor's plan, while Dupanloup of Orleans 
and Pie of Poitiers answered his pamphlets 
in uncompromising terms. The temporal 
power might fall, but it was utterly destroy- 
ing Gallicanism. Everywhere Catholics held 
meetings to express their abhorrence of the 
Revolution and their devoted attachment to 
the Holy Father. An English convert, 
Henry Edward Manning, drew the notice of 
all by his vehement defence of Papal prin- 
ciples. Such an explosion of enthusiasm on 



238 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

behalf of St. Peter^s successor had not been 
witnessed in modern history. The Pope was 
taking up on different hues that movement of 
democracy which he had blessed in 1846; 
and, though Italians were divided, the Cath- 
olic Church answered even passionately to his 
impulse. He had lost the Legations; he was 
master, as though Innocent III. had risen 
again, of believing multitudes in Europe and 
America. The year 1860 marks a revival of 
Roman power, spiritual and democratic, which 
has gone forward ever since without pause. 
! But the political fifth act was not to be 
avoided. Bishops might send up addresses 
by the hundred to Rome; men of such unlike 
temper as Veuillot and Lacordaire, Villemain 
and De Sacy, Disraeli, and Guizot, might 
insist, as if at a General Council, on the 
necessity for the Pope's temporal independ- 
ence and territorial sovereignty; they could 
not prevent the conquest of the Two Sicilies 
by Garibaldi; or Cavour's daring stroke, the 
march of Italian troops towards Ancona; or 
the defeat of Lamoriciere and his Papal 
forces, however gallant their behaviour, at 
Castel Fidardo, September 18, 1860. Yet, 
says De Cesare, who did not love the old 
regime, no occasion or pretext presented itself 
for declaring war on the Pope, invading his 



POPE PIUS IX. 239 

provinces, breaking up his army, and so 
marching on Naples. But Cavour was not 
deterred by these obstacles. Admiral Persano 
bombarded and took Ancona. On October 
26, 1860, Garibaldi met Victor Emmanuel 
at Teano, and saluted him as King of Italy. 

The first Italian Parliament assembled on 
February 18, 1861, at Turin. France, getting 
Nice and Savoy, had consented to the final 
incorporation of Romagna with Victor Em- 
manuel's new kingdom. To the Holy See 
was left, under French protection, the Patri- 
mony or old Duchy of Rome, largely a desert, 
and some half million of subjects. Inter- 
national law could not justify the Piedmont- 
ese invasion; Conservatives smiled at the 
"plebiscites" which followed obediently where 
the victor's sword pointed. Romagna had 
always, except during the Austrian occupa- 
tion, enjoyed Home Rule; but Cavour, in 
October, 1860, affirming the independence of 
Italy, declared that Rome must be its capital. 
The word was spoken. And "a Free Church 
in a Free State" was held out to the Pope in 
exchange for his sovereignty of a thousand 
years. 

Negotiations were at once set on foot. 
Pius IX., without allies or auxiliaries, listened 
to Cavour's proposals. Antonelli permitted 



240 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

a sort of protocol to be discussed; and Pas- 
saglia, the famous ex-Jesuit, was conducting 
the great business, as it seemed, to a success- 
ful end. But here the Siccardi laws warned 
Pius that if the Italians came to Rome they 
would suppress the monasteries, confiscate 
Church property, and in spite of their liberal 
formula, make the clergy a department of 
State. "'Jacobin decrees" at Naples and 
Palermo confirmed this judgment. He roused 
himself to deliver an allocution, March 18, 
1861, in which he flung back the attempts at 
an insidious reconciliation based on robbery, 
and refused to come to terms with it. Ca- 
vour died on June 6, and the Roman Ques- 
tion entered its last phase. 

A convention between France and the 
King of Italy was signed in September, 1864, 
binding the latter to respect what was left of 
the Papal territories, and the French to with- 
draw their garrison by degrees from Rome. 
But Napoleon required that a new capital 
should be definitely chosen, as some guaran- 
tee of peace. The Government, accordingly, 
moved down to Florence. By the end of 
December, 1866, all the French troops had 
left Roman soil. No stir was made. The 
people of the Eternal City were little disposed 
to embark on a revolution; they felt a sin- 



POPE PIUS IX. 241 

cere attachment to Pius IX., who treated 
them kindly, whatever his officials might do; 
and, as Napoleon III. believed, they would 
never rise of themselves. Neither did they. 
Garibaldi formed committees of insurrection, 
and openly undertook the liberation of Rome, 
while Rattazzi, the new premier, looked on. 
The general was interned September 24, 1867, 
in his island of Caprera; but his son Menotti 
crossed the Papal frontier, and there was 
fighting at Monte Libretti. WTiile Napoleon 
was hesitating Garibaldi escaped, traversed 
Tuscany, and captured Monte Rotondo, less 
than twenty miles from the gates of Rome. 
The French Catholics, the Empress, the 
leader of the bishops, Dupanloup, insisted on 
sending help to the Holy Father. Napoleon's 
lieutenant, Rouher, declared in the Chamber 
amid applause that the Italians should 
*' never" enter Rome. This "jamais" was 
not forgotten when Napoleon sought for an 
ally at Florence in 1870. The expedition 
sailed. Garibaldi had drawn close to the 
Porta Salara, but Rome would not rise; the 
free companies which he brought were drift- 
ing in all directions; and, as he was retiring 
upon Tivoli, November 3, 1867, a detachment 
of French, coming to aid the Papal troops, 
defeated him at Mentana. His army broke 



242 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

and fled. The September Convention was 
no more. 

That insignificant skirmish at Mentana had 
world-wide consequences. It brought back 
the French to Castel Sant' Angelo, where they 
proved a fatal hindrance to Italian unity as it 
was now conceived. It gave time for the 
assembling of the Vatican Council, and the 
passing of those decrees by which Gallican 
principles were stricken to death and the 
Pope was proclaimed infallible ex cathedra, in 
St. Peter's Chair. Like the affair of Bouvines, 
it was fought with a handful of soldiers, but 
has proved to be one of the decisive battles 
of the world. For the French empire and 
dynasty Mentana was a disaster, coming after 
its moral defeats in the Danish, Mexican, 
and Austrian wars, every one of which had 
darkened its fame and lessened its influence. 
Italian opinion would not suffer a single 
regiment of Bersaglieri to make common 
cause with French generals in 1870, who had 
boasted in 1867 that the chassepots had gone 
off of themselves on the approach of Gari- 
baldi's volunteers. Austria, now, as well as 
Italy, demanded that Rome should be left 
open to the Sardinian advance. Napoleon 
could not agree; and his efforts to create 
alliances against Prussia were broken upon 



POPE PIUS IX. 243 

this denial. Mentana was the prelude to 
Sedan. 

But if the Temporal Power from this day 
was visibly doomed to disappear, a movement 
parallel but in the contrary direction had 
been proceeding, which would exalt beyond 
measure the cause of Papal Rome. Since the 
return from Gaeta pilgrims had thronged to 
the Holy City as never before. Three great 
meetings of bishops, in 1854, 1862, and 1867, 
had assured Pius IX. of his unbounded influ- 
ence over the Cathohc world. His reply to 
the September Convention had been the 
Encyclical "Quanta Cura," and the Syllabus 
or Index of propositions condemned during 
his pontificate, which, though chiefly a con- 
servative document in accordance with prin- 
ciples of authority received everywhere, was 
cleverly turned by the revolutionaries, whom 
it struck hard, into an attack upon civihza- 
tion. Bishop Dupanloup showed its true 
meaning, and three hundred and sixty bish- 
ops wrote to signify their agreement with 
the Bishop of Orleans. French prelates led 
the Church at this time, somewhat as their 
cavalry ride into battle, d pas de charge. But 
in views they were not of one mind. Some 
Gallicans were left; the ambiguous party 
Called Liberal Catholics had a policy of their 



244 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

own. Among Germans, and especially at 
Munich, there was a school which had never 
been, or had ceased to be, ultramontane, con- 
trolled by the historian DoUinger. Moderate 
men asked for a Council in the hope of certain 
reforms. On prelates like Manning, Martin, 
Bonnechose, Deschamps; on laymen such as 
Veuillot and Ward, it was borne in by the 
course of events that to save society spiritual 
authority must be concentrated in the hands 
of the Pope, whom all acknowledged as the 
highest representative of Christian principles 
in the world. These writers had their own 
way of reasoning, no doubt; their moving 
impulse, however, was quite as much a social 
necessity as a deduction from grounds of 
doctrine; and its perfect expression was given 
by Joseph de Maistre when he published his 
treatise "Du Pape'' after Napoleon's down- 
fall. The Vatican Council was intended to 
protect Catholic interests from anarchy, by 
completing the work begun at Florence and 
left unfinished at Trent, of defining "St. 
Peter's privileges" in his successor. 

This was done, amid confiicts into which 
we need not enter, between December 8, 
1869, and July 18, 1870. No larger Council 
of Ecclesiastics has ever met. All continents 
were represented. The extraordinary growth 



POPE PIUS IX. 245 

of Catholicism in free countries was evidenced 
by new hierarchies in England, Canada, the 
United States, the British Empire at large. 
Its persistence under suflFering was a jewel 
on the foreheads of Irish, South American, 
and missionary bishops, who saw one another 
face to face in what seemed to devout on- 
lookers the full assembly of the Saints. A 
young American Bishop of Richmond, Vir- 
ginia, who has lived to be Cardinal Gibbons 
of Baltimore, could tell us lately that the 
Church, neither persecuted nor favoured by 
civil power, in those United States now reck- 
ons twenty-two millions, and is on the way to 
become the largest as well as the strongest of 
religious associations in the Western world. 

Against these mighty currents what could 
the Gallican or the Regalist achieve with his 
worn-out traditions.^ One of the wisest ob- 
servations ever made on the whole subject is 
that of Count von Moltke— ''The future of 
Rome does not depend on Rome itself, but 
on the direction that religious development 
will take in other countries." And Lord 
Acton has written, "Pius IX. knew that in 
all that procession of seven hundred and 
fifty bishops one idea prevailed. Men whose 
word is powerful in the centres of civiliza- 
tion, men who three months before were 



246 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

confronting martyrdom amongst barbarians, 
preachers at Notre Dame, professors from 
Germany, Republicans from Western Amer- 
ica, men with every sort of training and every 
sort of experience, had come together as con- 
fident and eager as the prelates of Rome, to 
hail the Pope infallible." But with his doc- 
trinal authority went an ordinary supreme 
jurisdiction, which not only shattered in 
pieces the Articles of 1682, but enabled the 
Pope to govern local Churches as the Bishop 
of bishops. Moreover, in the presence of a 
universal dissolving movement, anti-social no 
less than anti-Christian, a perpetual dictator 
was needed, and who could it be save the 
Pontifex Maximus.^^ These measures were 
taken as by foreboding of the crisis that came 
suddenly upon Europe. The last session of 
the Vatican Council was held in St. Peter's 
amid thunder and lightning on a July day, 
while France and Germany rushed to arms. 
The war which was to decide the temporal 
fate of Rome had been declared three days 
previously (July 15, 1870). On the morrow 
it broke out. 

In that burning summer-time, we who were 
staying in Rome saw the French bishops 
depart, and knew that the French soldiers 
would soon follow them from the Aventine* 



POPE PIUS IX. 247 

They went, those heroic young men, to be 
defeated in the battles of August; and the 
Papal Zouaves, who were faithful to the last, 
were destined to win the field of Patay. But 
no one was acquainted with the mind of Ger- 
many; and on that mind we waited, while 
the Empire was falling to pieces. Thirty 
thousand Italian troops kept a watch on the 
frontier, ready to break in if the Romans 
would seize Rome. But, as ever, the Romans 
did no more than buy flags which might be 
hung out according to fortune, the Pope's 
colours so long as they were needed, the 
tricolour invented long ago by Republican 
Bologna when Ejng Victor's regiments should 
come marching in. The King himself was 
torn between feelings of gratitude to France 
and the conviction that if he did not put an 
end to the Temporal Power it would cost 
him his throne. The Revolution was alert 
in Naples and Milan. But the ghost of the 
September Convention vanished when a 
Republic succeeded to the Empire. Count 
Bismarck had purchased Italian neutrality 
by giving a free hand to the Government at 
Florence. After a moment of hesitation 
ministers were allowed to act. Ponza di San 
Martino brought a royal letter to the Vatican, 
in which '%ith the devotion of a son, the 



248 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

faith of a Catholic, the loyalty of a king, and 
the heart of an Italian/' Victor Emmanuel 
told Pius IX. that he intended to occupy the 
Papal States. The Pope answered by a 
single word — '^ Might then comes before 
right.'' When for the last time, at the Piazza 
dei Termini, he made an oflScial appearance 
in public, the Holy Father was greeted by the 
Romans with frantic enthusiasm. But they 
had their two sets of flags ready. 

On September 11 General Cadorna, who 
had once served in the sanctuary, crossed the 
Papal boundaries and made straight for 
Rome. Mazzini lay in prison at Gaeta; 
Garibaldi in Caprera was closely watched. 
The Italian Government had resolved that 
none but itself should crown the edifice built 
up during twenty years of war and diplomacy 
to the honour of Savoy. The new French 
Republic called away the Antibes legion of 
volunteers on September 13, not wishing that 
their tricolour should be seen in conflict with 
the Piedmontese. From all European capi- 
tals word arrived in Florence allowing the 
invasion to proceed. The Pope stood alone. 
^'Venit summa dies et ineluctabile tempus." 
It was the last day of his earthly dominion, j 

September 20, 1870, dawned in a pure sky, 
with golden fringes edging the clouds that 



POPE PIUS IX. 249 

lay along on the Latin Hills. It had been 
a week of dust and sunshine in beleaguered 
Rome. Count Arnim, the Prussian, had 
gone busily to and fro between the camp out- 
side and the Vatican, desirous that a peace- 
able entry might be made, and the clatter 
of artillery might not announce to Europe this 
portentous violation of domicile. His half- 
smiling intervention had failed. On the 
evening of September 19, the Holy Father 
drove across Rome to the Piazza of St. John 
Lateran, ascended the Scala Santa, and gave 
his blessing to the troop which held that gate. 
He was never afterwards seen in the streets of 
Rome. General Kanzler had it in command 
to resist until wall or gate was battered down. 
And so, in the clear air of that September 
morning, the twentieth, we saw the smoke of 
the cannonade rise like an exhalation from 
Porta Salara round to Porta Pia, and at other 
gates there was a feigned attack; but the 
headlong General Bixio furiously assailed the 
Porta San Pancrazio, while his grenades 
struck the windows of the Vatican and his 
artillery accompanied with its volleys the 
Mass which Pius IX. was saying in his private 
chapel. The corjps diplomatique waited round 
him, having no commission but to look on. 
Some misunderstanding prolonged the resist- 



250 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

ance and multiplied the casualties. At ten 
o'clock we saw the white flag waving high 
over St. Peter's dome. We heard afar off 
from our College roof the thunder of the 
captains and the shouting, as through the 
shattered walls of Porta Pia streamed in a 
mixed array of soldiers, refugees, camp- 
foUow^ers, along the street afterwards named 
from the Twentieth of September. Early in 
the afternoon we saw Italian standards float- 
ing from the Capitol. Rome had once con- 
quered Italy. Now Italy had conquered 
Rome. 

The usual plebiscite followed. By national 
decree the City of the Popes was elevated or 
degraded into the chief town of a modern 
State, created yesterday. King Victor Em- 
manuel broke his way with crowbars into the 
Quirinal. Monasteries were transformed into 
ministries, said the satire-loving Romans. The 
Jesuits were suppressed, and their escutcheon 
over the great door of the Roman College was 
hammered to pieces. The Siccardi law, de- 
spite guarantees, was extended to the former 
Papal States, justifying Pius IX. in his pre- 
sentiments. But he, without so much as the 
Leonine City left to him, put aside civil lists 
and legal establishments, living on the alms of 
the faithful, visited in his Apostolic prison by 



POPE PIUS IX. 251 

multitudes, year after year, who bore witness 
to his growing rehgious influence over the 
milKons for whom they were ambassadors. 
The King died on January 9, the Pope on 
February 7, 1878. Pius IX. had outhved the 
"years of Peter"; and he had followed the 
Temporal Power to its grave. 

"No human pen," says Lecky in a fine 
passage, "can write its epitaph, for no 
imagination can adequately realize its glories. 
In the eyes of those who estimate the great- 
ness of a sovereignty, not by the extent of 
its territory, or by the valour of its soldiers, 
but by the influence which it has exercised 
over mankind, the Papal government has had 
no rival, and can have no successor. But 
though we may not fully estimate the majesty 
of its past, we can at least trace the causes of 
its decline." He goes on to enumerate them; 
but the sum is this — once Religion flourished 
by means of establishments and coercive 
power, now politics and religion are divorced 
for ever. 

But let us not confound the social organism 
with political machinery. It remains always 
true, as Auguste Comte perceived, that so- 
ciety rests on a creed, explicit or latent, in 
which its members are united; that its law is 
ethics and its standard conscience. True like- 



252 PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES 

wise it is that the Pope cannot deny his 
origin, which was not a victory of the strong 
arm, but was due to the free immortal spirit. 
He never can be absorbed by the absolute 
State, for he is the pilgrim of eternity. And 
thus, a prisoner in the Vatican, without 
kingdom or army, Leo XIII., succeeding im- 
mediately to Pius IX., began and ended a 
reign of twenty-six years, the most brilliant 
in its manifestations and most fruitful in 
results of any since the Sack of Rome. Allow- 
ing that American forms of government will 
more and more prevail, that privilege will 
give place to liberty, and free association 
limit the State itself, what does it all mean.^ 
Surely the triumph of principle over force, 
of moral influence over legal enactment. But 
so it was that the Roman Church began, 
*' presiding in love,'' as said St. Ignatius of 
Antioch; so did she attain to her supremacy 
in the ages called of Faith. Her appeal is 
to the Cross. 

"Christ conquers, Christ reigns, Christ commands. 
Christ defend His people from all harm." 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



All the subjects handled in this volume may be studied from 
the orthodox and Roman point of view in The Catholic Encyclo- 
pcedia, now publishing in eighteen volumes at New York. The 
Cambridge Modern History, especially on the Renaissance, 
Reformation, and French Revolution, covers the ground from 
about 1450. Gregorovius, History of the City of Rome, extends 
from fourth to sixteenth century. The Papal registers are 
in course of publication from the period of Avignon. 

For the prelude, consult Barry, Papal Monarchy; Bryce, 
Holy Roman Empire; Duchesne, First Period of the Papal 
States (Fr.); Luchaire, Innocent III. (Ft.). 

For Avignon and Renaissance : Pastor, History of the Popes, 
ten volumes (E. Tr.), is indispensable. Creighton, same title 
and period; Milman, Latin Christianity, VII. -XI.; Symonds, 
Renaissance, picturesque but unreKable; Hefele, Councils, 
for Constance and Basle; Hofler, Popes of Avignon (Ger.); 
Valois, France and the Great Schism (Fr.); Gardner, E. G., 
St. Catherine of Siena; Kitts, E. J., In the Days of the Coun- 
cils and Pope John XXIII.; Gairdner, J., The Lollards; Voigt, 
Revival of Classical Antiquity (Ger.); Miintz, Art and the 
Papal Court (Fr.) ; Burckhardt or Geiger on art and literature 
of the Renaissance (E. Tr.); Vaughan, H. M., Medici Popes; 
Brosch, Julius II. (Ger.); Roscoe, Leo X., still valuable; 
Kraus on Popes and Culture in Cambridge History, II.; Lea, 
Inquisition in Middle Ages; Lilly, W. S., Renaissance Types, 
Erasmus, etc., Froude on the same subject, inaccurate. Grego- 
rovius, LuAyrezia Borgia; Villari, Machiavelli and Savonarola 
(E. Tr.); Lucas, Savonarola. 

For Reformation period: Ranke, History of Popes, sixteenth 
and seventeenth century, with Macaulay's classic review; 
Janssens, History of the German People (E. Tr.), standard 
work; Lea, Inquisition in Spain; Lord Acton, History of 
Freedom, Historical Essays and Studies, Lectures on Modern 
History; all deserving careful attention, and dealing with 
Persecution, Temporal Power, Democracy; Denifle and Grisar 
on Luther and Lutheranism ((ier.), give strong Catholic view; 
Dollinger, Reformation, an early work; Contributions to History, 
sixteenth and seventeenth century (Ger.), after 1870; M5hler, 
Symbolism (E. Tr.), standard work on Protestant Formularies; 
Gasquet, Henry VIII. and Monasticism, and Eve of Reforma- 
tion; Bridgett, Lives of More and Fisher; Gairdner, J., English 
Church in Sixteenth Century; Sanders, Origin of Anglican 
Schism (E. Tr.) ; Thompson, F., Life of St. Ignatius of Loyola; 

253 



254 BIBLIOGRAPHY 



Barry, Calvin^ in Catholic Encyclopaedia; Baird, History of 
Rise of Huguenots; Law, Catholic Tractates of Sixteenth Century; 
Maurenbrecher, on Charles V.; Maximilian II., Catholic Reform 
in Germany, etc. (all Ger.), of great importance; see also 
MoUer (Lutheran), Church History III. on same subjects. 

There is no general history of the Jesuits in English. The 
French by Cretineau^ Joly has many faults. The Society 
published its own in six portions and in Latin, down to 1620; 
it is printing its Monumenta in various languages, 1894 onwards. 
Pallavicini and Theiner give History of Council of Trent. See 
also Ward, A. W., The Counter-Reformation, in Episodes of 
Church History. 

For Gallicanism and its affinities: St. Beuve, Port Royal 
(Ft.) is the best literary account of Jansenism. Bossuet, 
Defence of the Declaration of 1682 (Lat.), in his works; Fleury, 
Church History and new minor works (opuscules, Fr.) ; Jervis, 
History of the Gallican Church, very learned; Michaud, Louis 
XIV. arid Innocent XI. (Fr.); De Maistre, Du Pape and 
UEglise Gallicane, the most famous treatment of whole 
question; Hergenrother, Catholic Church and Christian State, 
E. Tr. by Devas, documentary and polemical, best modern 
work on the Encyclical and Syllabus of 1864 ; Meyer, Febronius 
(Ger.), anti-Roman; ^ Haller, _ Papacy/ and German Catholic 
Reform (Ger.). 

For eighteenth century Free Thought, Lecky, Rationalism; 
Leslie Stephen, under above heading; Morley on Voltaire, 
Rousseau, Diderot, may be consulted, all partisans of the 
Enlightenment. Devas, C. E., Key to the World's Progress, takes 
the Catholic view, and criticizes the whole movement. 

Since French Revolution : Nielsen (Lutheran bishop) , History 
of Papacy in Nineteenth Century (E. Tr.), especially volume ii. 
Artaud de Montor, History of the Sovereign Pontiffs (Fr.); 
Consalvi and Pacca, Memoirs (Pacca, E. Tr.); Chateaubriand, 
Genius of Christianity (Fr.); Autobiography (E. Tr. by De 
Mattos) ; D'Haussonville, Napoleon and Pius VII. (Fr.) ; Life 
of DoUinger (Ger.); Capefigue, Restoration and Louis Philippe; 
Gibson, Lamennais; and L.'s correspondence. Words of a 
Believer, Affairs of Rome (Fr.) ; Newman's Apologia, Essays, 
Critical arid Historical, Correspondence; Gioberti, Life and 
Letters (Ital.); Rosmini, Life and Roman Mission (Ital.); also 
English Life by Lockhart; (5rawford, M., Ave Roma Immortalis; 
Tivaroni, a Mazzinian, History of the Italian Risorgimento 
(Ital.); Countess M. Cesaresco, Liberation of Italy; Bolton 
King, History of Italian Unity; C. Cantu, on Italian Inde- 
pendence; Mazade C. de, Cavour (Fr.) ; and C.*s correspondence; 
Dollinger, The Church and the Churches (E. Tr.); Lagrange, 
Life of Dupanloup (E. Tr.) ; Ollivier, E., The Liberal Empire 
and Church and State in the Vatican Council (Fr.) ; Brosch, 
History of Papal States II., on Pius IX.; and Nurenberger, 
Popedom and Ecclesiastical States (Ger.) ; De Cesare, Last Days 
of Papal Rome (E. Tr.).^ 



INDEX 



AiiERTCA, 89, 181-6, 201, 218, 245. 
Avignon, 31-59; Popes in, 44, 
49, 130. 

Councils, Vienne, 56; Pisa, 56; 
Constance, 59-63; Basle, 69-71; 
Lateran Fifth, 97, 98; Trent, 
129, 152; Vatican, 244-6. 

Dante, 37. 

Emperors, Roman, Augtistus, 11; 
Nero, 13; Constantine, 15; 
Justinian, 27; Holy Roman 
and German, Charlemagne, 20; 
Otho I., III., 20; Henry III., 
17; Henry IV., 22, 23; Henry 
v., 25; Frederick I., II., 26, 
28, 29; Rudolph I., 29; Louis, 
Bavarian, 38, 41; Charles IV., 
42, 46; Sigismimd, 59-70; 
Charles V., 105-8-9-10, 123-5; 
Ferdinand II., 143-4; Corona- 
tions in Rome, 99-100; Greek, 
73-6. 

Enlightenment, 165-8, esp. Mon- 
tesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, 
173-5. 

Febronius and Joseph II., 180-1. 
Francis I., 97, 109, 125. 

Gallicanism and af&nities, 151; 
Jansenism, 151-3; Bull Uni- 
genitus, 169; Louis XIV., 
148-60; Innocent XI., 156; 
James II., 158; Bossuet, 157, 
161, 180, 203. 

Jesuits, 108, 115-20, 129-30, 140- 
64; Fall of Society, 170-9, 
229. 

Marsilius of Padua, 39. 

Philip II., 125, 127-9, 133-7; 

Philip the Fair, 30, 31, 34, 

36. 
Popes, Leo I., 15; Gregory I., 

l6,^Hadrian I., 18; Leo III., 



18; Silvester II., 20; Leo IX., 
21; Urban II., 24; Hadrian 
IV., 26; Alexander III., 26-7; 
Innocent III., 28; Gregory X., 
28; Clement V., 34, 36, 37; 
Popes in France and French, 
34-6; in Avignon, 44-9; Urban 
VI., 49, and Roman succession, 
56, 61; Alexander V., 58; 
John XXIII., 58 seq.; Martin 
v., 63-9; Renaissance Popes, 
72-8; Calixtus III., 81; Sixtua 
IV., 84-6; Alexander VI., 87- 
94; Julius II., 84-5, 94-6-8, 
100-1; Leo X., 97, 103 seq.; 
Adrian VL, 107; Clement 
VII., 109, 114; of Catholic 
Revival, 130-2; Paul III., 
114-30; Paul IV., 130; St. 
Pius v., 131, 162; Gregory 
XIIL, 131; Sixtus V., 132; 
Urban VIII., 142; Innocent 
X., 146; XL, 156; XII., 159; 
of eighteenth century, 163-4; 
Pius VL, 195; VII., 196-210; 
Leo XII., 218, 220; Gregory 
XVL, 224; Pius IX., 228-52; 
Leo XIIL, 252; Popes and 
Islam, 16, 20, 24, 77, 161; 
Papal Families, Borgias, 81; 
Rovere, 83; Medici, 85; Far- 
nese, 114, 135. 

Reformation, Wy cliff e, 41, 62; 
Luther, 98, 103 seq., 125; 
Henry VIIL, 113-4, 122; Cal- 
vin, 121-3-6-7, 140, 158. 

Renaissance, 72-5, 79-81, 88, 
97; and St. Peter's, 99, 101. 

Restoration, French, 219. 

Revival, Catholic, 114; in Rome/ 
139-41; Bohemia, 138; Austria, 
142; America, 164. 

Revolution, French, 186 seq.; 
clergy, 188; ci\al constitution, 
189-93; persecutions, 194; 
Bonaparte in Italy, 195-6; 
Concordat, 198-206; Rome 
annexed, 207; Pius VII., 
captive and restored, 207-10. 



i56 



256 



INDEX 



Richelieu, 143-6. 
Rienzi, 44, 46. 

Rome, sack of, 111, 113; Fall of, 
248-50. 

Savonarola, 90-2. 

War, Thirty Years', 137-47; 

Tilly, 143; Wallenstein, 144; 

Gustavus Adolphus, 144-5; 

Treaty of Westphalia, 146-7. 
Waterloo to 1870, 211-52; Metter- 

nich, 211, 215-6, 225; Napoleon 
. I., 211, 213; Consalvi, 214, 217. 

218; Chateaubriand, 197, 214-6, 



218; Lamennais, 220-5; Gregory 
XVI., 224-7; Manzoni, 226, 233; 
Mazzini, 226-8, 231, 248; Roa- 
mini, 226, 229; Gioberti, 226, 
232; Rossi, 227, 230; Pius IX., 
228-52; Napoleon III., 231- 
3-6-7, 241-2; AntonelU, 231, 
236; Garibaldi, 231-3, 241, 
248; Victor Emmanuel, 233, 
247; Cavour, 233 seq., 238-40; 
Dupanloup, 237, 243; Castel 
Fidardo, 238; Mentana, 242; 
Syllabus, 243; Vatican Council, 
244; Fall of Rome, 248-50; 
Leo XIII.. 252. 



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